


Short Change Heroes

by csoru, Febricant



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe - Deadpool Fusion, Breathplay, Canon-Typical Violence, Choking, Coercion, Collars, Electrocution, Explicit Mudersex, FOR DEADPOOL, Foul Language Of Every Kind, Knifeplay, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mom Jokes, Murder, No Negotiation About Anything, Offensive humour, Shitty Vigilantism, Slapstick, Temporary Character Death, Torture, okay here we go:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-14
Updated: 2016-05-16
Packaged: 2018-06-08 10:20:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 64,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6850828
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/csoru/pseuds/csoru, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Febricant/pseuds/Febricant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ray’s immortal now. It’s a long story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> CONTENT WARNINGS:
> 
> Hello. If you’ve clicked this on purpose, welcome. Here’s what you need to know: this takes place in the Deadpool movieverse, and is an AU of that. So, consider that Deadpool is a severely damaged science experiment and adjust accordingly. 
> 
> In this you will find insults of all kinds including homophobic, as per Generation Kill’s dialogue, and a fuckton of fucked up fucking, as per the tags above. Does that cover it? We hope so. 
> 
> Please see endnotes for spoilery warnings.

**April, 2006**

There ought to be plenty of things stranger than waking up to find Ray Person eating the last of his fucking spicy Doritos, but offhand Brad can’t think of a single one.

Ray, leaning against the kitchen counter, has a spread of orange dust around his mouth, dark circles under his eyes and the look of someone having the orgasm of a lifetime.

Other than that, he seems fine. Brad shakes it off, jumping immediately to the logical conclusion. Ray is fine. Ray is here, apparently conducting a string of breakings and enterings, if the way the door is hanging off its hinges is anything to go by.

Brad, on balance, thinks it’s a little bit of an over-reaction to shoot him, and puts away his gun.

He clears his throat.

“Homes,” Ray says, around a mouthful of chips, “have you got any more of these?”

Wordlessly, Brad points at the cabinet beside the one Ray has obviously ratfucked.

He watches Ray eat through two packs of tortilla chips, a bowl of microwave popcorn and a whole tub of the ice cream Brad hasn’t touched in months before he can get another word out of him.

“Ray, what the fuck are you doing here?”

Ray looks at him over the spoon still trapped in his jaws, chocolate seeping between his crowded teeth. Brad is unprepared for the laugh, a high, strange boom that expels the utensil from Ray’s mouth halfway across the kitchen island.

“Dude. You blew my fucking head off. I figured I should thank you, you know? Give it the personal touch. Thanks, Colbert, for killing me in the line of duty. I owe you a motherfucking blowjob.” He giggles. “You know. In return.”

Brad stares at him. Up close, Ray is a mess, but not in a way Brad can put a finger on. It’s the quality of the whole, he decides. It’s the look in his eyes that says Ray is completely serious, grinning as though he’s just made the best joke in the world.

Ray is patently alive. Brad has touched him, brushing past him to hand him the spoon, and he’s as warm as he always was, as though running a low grade fever to keep up with his mouth. “Can you catch mad cow disease from fucking one?”

“Probably,” Ray says, running a finger around the inside rim of the empty ice cream carton, sticking it in his mouth with abandon. “Who the fuck knows what they’re putting in cow feed these days, you know?” He speaks around his finger, teeth digging into the knuckle before he scrapes it out with a distinctly suggestive leer. “Honestly, you really have to let the hick thing go. That’s an ugly stereotype. I’ll have you know I’m the salt of the earth.” Something about this must be hilarious to Ray because he crushes the carton and launches it at the garbage with unerringly perfect aim, grinning all the while.

“Ray!”

“What can I say, Brad. All that military discipline was good for me after all. And then all the discipline after that. Maybe just discipline in general.”

Brad takes a step back. Ray is wearing ordinary clothes, for Ray off-duty, a pair of jeans that have seen better days and a shirt a little too loose. His dark hair is growing out as though it’s been recently shaved down to the skull, and Brad suddenly feels as though the room is tilting on some heretofore unknown axis.

It’s one thing to be in-country — in this case Afghanistan because why shouldn’t war be a kind of never-ending moebius of fuckups — and get a legit mission to scope out the platoon of merc auxiliaries they’ve been tracking. It’s another to have a line-of-sight kill turn your stomach after years of desensitising yourself to the act. It’s worse to see a profile you recognise; to have, in that moment, a split second of hesitation because the guy you’re about to take out looks a lot like —

“Earth to Brad,” Ray says, waving a hand in front of his face, suddenly much closer. “Jesus, are you hungover? Do you have _alcohol?_ ” He pokes Brad in the chest, suddenly serious. “You have no _idea_ how much I’ve missed alcohol.”

“Where the fuck have you been?” Brad makes to grab his wrist, wanting to remove Ray from his personal space for no reason he can name. It never bothered him before, but —

Ray’s face goes completely blank, and the next thing Brad knows is excruciating pain, his arm twisted up too far behind him. It is a testament to his surprise that Ray manages it at all, a testament to how compromised Brad is, or just to something more impossible and terrifying than Brad can parse. He jerks, struggling, using his greater weight, but Ray bears down, completely silent and unmindful of all the ways Brad could hurt him in return. Brad has a moment of pure, unadulterated disbelief that Ray Person, 5’8” and 165 soaking wet, has managed this, after years and years of relying only on his speed and his mouth to get him out of trouble. It’s only another second before Ray lets him go, skittering away across Brad’s pristine kitchen floor, but it feels like eternity, memory warring with tangible, heavyweight reality.

“Shit, Brad,” Ray says, shaking his head as if to clear it, grin a rictus, “you’re getting rusty in your old age.”

Brad sits up, elbow screaming as he forces it to bear weight. Ray’s grip still burns, as though he’s left a trace element on Brad’s skin. “Where the _fuck_ have you been?” Brad tries again, hoping the answer will be different to what he is already beginning to suspect.

He feels Ray’s look like a kick in the chest, tired brown eyes set deep in his thin face, at odds with the stretched smile, chocolate stain around his lips serving only to widen it. “Dude, pay attention. I know all this—” he gestures at himself, an aborted sweep over his crouched body, “—can be distracting, but you’ve really gotta keep up.” He straightens, very slowly, until he is back where Brad found him, occupying the one spot in the kitchen which has no line of sight from a window. “Afghanistan, remember? You blew my head off.”

Ray cocks a finger at Brad like a pistol and mimes it firing. _Pow._

The image comes back: Ray’s profile, his straight nose and square chin, the downslope of his oversized eyes. Image first, situational detail, the evening chill, the sweat catching at the back of his neck, and then the feeling: something not right, not possible, not logical.

Brad had pulled the trigger anyway. Even good soldiers see things they can’t explain, sometimes. Even good soldiers see old faces in new rifle sights.

“Start from the beginning,” Brad says, keeping himself level by training alone.

Ray snorts. “Oh, _now_ you wanna know? Show me where the booze is, before I have to beat it out of you.”

Three years ago, Brad would have called his bluff.

Instead, he pushes himself up, keeping Ray in his sight as he finds the last full bottle of liquor on his shelf.

“That’s more like it,” Ray croons at the bottle.

Brad recalls, vividly, that Ray has never liked tequila, but now he’s holding it like he’s never seen anything better.

Brad waits, sure that silence, at this point, is his only viable option. Anything else risks him asking for the wrong detail, hitting the wrong tone, pressing the wrong button. Three years ago, Brad would have known exactly where to press to get Ray going. Now, whatever is in his kitchen might look like Ray, might sound like Ray, but Brad gets the feeling he’s looking at something different.

The door catches his eye, hanging off the top joint, splintered around the lock. It’s professionally caved, unmistakable. Ray catches him looking. “What? Like you were just gonna let me in?”

Brad might have, if he had seen Ray through the glass, standing there very much alive. Or he would have assumed he was dreaming, that he was somehow lucid and conjuring ghosts in his sleep.

“You wanna sit down?” Brad asks, watching Ray’s eyes track him as he moves a half-step towards the couch. “If you pass out standing I’m not hauling your ass to the hospital.”

Ray doesn’t laugh. “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.”

Nonetheless, he follows Brad into the living room, skating his fingers over the wallpaper as though memorising it, twisting the cap off the tequila one-handed. By the time Brad has him sitting down he’s downed a fourth of it, barely a change in his expression save for an incremental softening around his eyes.

Last time Brad saw him on a comedown, getting a word out of him took a beating. Brad doesn’t think that will do anything now but end with him right back where he was a few minutes ago, facedown on his own hardwood floors. A part of him, the part that saw Ray — combat-thin and dirty enough to look blurred around the edges — dive for Rudy as though the prospect of Rudy killing him was the force spurring him on, wants to try it. Brad swallows back the feeling, the burning sensation trapped in his throat. Instead, he watches Ray drink. If his elbow didn’t still ache, twist in the sinew still a faint, painful echo, Brad would be tempted to assign this to fatigue, to lack of work and lack of sleep all bundled together. A younger, smaller part of him wonders what name he could give this, what Ray is now, if he isn’t quite Ray. A golem, the old dirt made flesh only by words.

“Shit,” Ray mutters, capping the bottle with his thumb. “You know what’s worse than being fucking immortal, Brad?” He carries on without waiting for an answer: “I’ll tell you, homes. It’s _this_ shit.” He gestures with the bottle, taking in the room, the apartment, and them, situated ten feet apart from each other, Brad watching Ray drink straight tequila on the couch at ten in the morning. He’s beginning to slur, movements slowing back from his jerky, piano-wire tension. “Trial and error. Just like being back in the Marines, licking fucking radio wires, except who the fuck knows what’s gonna get a signal through this time. This one guy? He watched a whole finger grow back with a stopwatch. Twenty-eight minutes.” Ray takes a swig again, closing his eyes in apparent pleasure. “Do you think I could drink myself to death and then just wake up in the morning?”

The bottom drops out of Brad’s stomach. The last time he’d felt like this he’d been so deep underwater that if the failure had been real instead of a warning he’d have suffocated long before achieving sufficient decompression to surface. This time, like last time, he breathes slowly, refusing to panic. “Seems like you’re giving it a shot.”

Ray cackles. “Nice,” he says, and drinks the rest.

-

**February, 2006**

Brad’s second tour in Afghanistan, no one, not even the couple of lance corporals fresh out of BRC and so green they could direct air traffic in the dark, tries to holler Johnny Cash or Lynyrd fucking Skynyrd anywhere in his hearing range. He can’t begin to explain why he’s disappointed by that fact.

His second tour in Afghanistan, and it’s déjà vu all over again: same shit every fucking day, like clockwork, only the place is different. Different country; different province than last time, different base. The air is heavier than in Iraq, and the mountain range within spitting distance of the FOB is greyer than what he’d expect back across the Atlantic, in Wyoming or someplace, but ultimately it’s true what they say. The more things change. Bravo company has gone through half a rotation of new guys, with the few remaining whom Brad has known for a couple of years reduced to daydreaming about what they might do after this tour, and the rest — the stalwart minority — all lifers. They share barracks with an Australian army detachment, and even that carries a stale sense of familiarity: the same insults, the same posturing and bullshitting, now echoed back in mutually incomprehensible accents.

One night Brad drapes himself over a stack of crates high enough he doesn’t have to try impersonating a midget, squinting upside down at the tangled mess of wires and batteries strewn across the cot. Martinez, one pen stuck behind an ear and a second in his mouth, looks as if he’s trying to decipher his own handwriting on a stained piece of paper. Security protocols, probably.

“Corporal.” Brad waits to have his attention, and only then goes on. “Good work today. Whatever the hell it was you did to unfuck our comms, that was solid work.”

“Any word on how long we’re gonna be stuck on UHF? They’re good enough for desert warfare, but this is moutain fucking country, Sergeant.”

Sensing movement at his nine, Brad shifts to make space. Another heartbeat and Lilley sidles up to him, one elbow on the crate. “The Marine Corps teaches you to appreciate what you’ve got, brah. Next time maybe we won’t even have radios.”

“So keep doing what you’re doing,” Brad finishes. “Just try not to lick anything. That would be unsanitary.”

Lilley looks at him, then, speculative. Everyone who’s known Brad in Iraq or earlier gives him the same look any time he opens his mouth to say something about their shitty radios, and it’s the look one might give a widower. It sets Brad’s teeth on edge and lives under his skin, in the no man’s land between his veins and bones. Some things change more than others; the one that never does is that he does his job, and does it well. He’s earned some well-deserved bitching.

“You hear the word on Person, Brad?” Lilley asks, directing the question to the wires on Martinez’s cot.

“I don’t subscribe to the knitting circle reader’s digest, so no. How is it any of my goddamn business what he does these days?”

“Well, I’ve got a buddy in 2/1, who knows Ray from way back when — they did basic together, or something. Anyway, word is? He got snatched by the Company for some under the table black ops shit, all on the downlow, and that’s why no one’s heard from him for so long.”

Brad turns, for a beat unable to find adequate words. “The CIA? Lilley, that is the single most retarded thing I’ve ever fucking heard.” He pauses, and lets the corners of his mouth curl upwards. “Let’s be realistic, here. The CIA wouldn’t recognise competence if it got shoved up their assholes and out the other side. They’d sooner hire Encino Man full time than take the opportunity to get their hands on the best RTO in the business.”

On the cot, Martinez shifts. Lilley gently knocks his fist against his shoulder, laughing when the kid jumps. “Don’t worry, brah, you’re good.”

“Yeah. Keep it up.”

Brad leaves and doesn’t, pointedly and at length, think about what manner of brain-damaged voicemails might be waiting for him back home. If any; it’s been close to a year since the last time he’s made any kind of effort to stay in touch. He hasn’t heard from Poke or Rudy in months, too.

Things change. Some more than others.

The orders, when they come in, are the usual jumble of incomprehensible gibberish mixed with wishful thinking, bad intel that might have been solid back Stateside but got lost sometime in the relying, like a half-assed game of telephone. They’re supposed to do long-range reconnaissance on a suspected paramilitary cell, strict observation without movement to engage, or they’re supposed to laser-paint a target for an air strike, or they’re supposed to take a bunch of mercenaries the fuck out. It’s local militia, it’s a UN detachment gone rogue, or it’s a Spetsnaz operation. Four US Marines are dead, or it’s a preemptive strike. Only the coordinates don’t change in the two weeks Brad is given to prepare his team to move out, and he familiarises himself with satellite images of the designated AO, hoping against hope that the mission doesn’t get fragged as soon as they step off.

By the time their helicopter transport is hovering over its destination in Assfuck, Hindu Kush, Brad recognises the topography as though he’d seen it before: grey and brown foothills tapering off into a white-crested mountain range in the distance, and not a soul in sight for the eighteen miles between their drop zone and their target. It’s loud in the helicopter, and it will be loud once they’re on the move. Brad can’t wait.

Next to him, Martinez has to shout to make sure his impassioned speech about fucking Kocher’s mom is heard by all. Brad raises his own voice to drown him out.

“Corporal, I’m sure that high lung capacity comes in useful when you’re on your knees with a mouthful of officer cock, but since none are present, you can shut the fuck up.”

“Let the kid have his fun, Brad,” says Kocher, though his white-knuckled grip on his rifle eases once Martinez stops talking. “Baby’s first real recon mission. He’s kind of fucking adorable.”

“He’s kind of fucking retarded,” Brad corrects, but grins at Martinez, including him in the conversation. The kid is young, still finding his feet in the battalion; he needs the training wheels, on the ground and in the pack, and it’s that as much as his efficiency with busted comms that made Brad pick him for this op. “But then again, it is our secondary MOS, taking in special ed rejects too mentally deficient even for affirmative action and turning them into as close to real men as they’ll ever get.”

On the opposite bench, Lee just shakes his head and Miller cackles before picking up the thread. Brad tunes them out, until their radios throw up a burst of white noise and the pilot’s voice comes in, Louisiana vowels caught and sharpened on the ridges of static, and they’re on.

It’s cold and dark on the ground as they’re loading their gear into the humvee, biting wind knocking air out of their lungs. Conversation trickles down to the bare necessities, status updates and muttered curses. The tips of Brad’s fingers are numb. He hasn’t had a real shower in about a week. He’s got dirt so far up his ass he can taste it at the back of his throat. He won’t have a solid idea of what their orders will be until the moment they have eyes on the enemy target. He hasn’t felt this alive in weeks, since the last mission that didn’t get fucked six ways to Sunday halfway through; and before then, since coming back from Iraq.

“All right, gentlemen.” A brief pause follows his raised voice, and he leans against the hood of the humvee, finally at ease. “Let’s make some money.”

-

**September, 2005**

The collar fucking itches. It’s marginally better than being zapped and having to deal with the healing, but frankly Ray has been in better moods. It’s worthless to pull at it. He does it anyway, sticking a finger between metal and skin, hoping for a fucking breeze or something.

It’s hot as balls in Marjah and Ray doesn’t want to sweat into a burn for the next fuck-knows-how-many hours, but it isn’t only the heat that keeps his mouth mostly shut. His Pashto’s still for shit, but unfortunately he can’t say the same for his Russian. He hasn’t said a word of it, but at some point Ray started obeying orders in it, and that was as much as Polonov had needed to switch down.

Antagonising Polonov now will get Ray nothing. Waiting a little and getting him in an even worse mood sometimes pays off in an entertaining explosion, but it’s only boredom that pushes him to consider it. It’s been tempting, over the last year, to jab him just right, provoke something out of him that isn’t just a hand in a pocket and twenty thousand volts directly through the spinal column. Occasionally, Ray has even succeeded.

Ray would call him a bastard, but that’s an insult to bastards, who generally, in Ray’s opinion, don’t have much say in the state of their births. Nobody here gives a shit what he thinks, which is just as well, because most of what he thinks is that this is all fucked six ways to Sunday.

Marjah looks the same as it did last time: green fields and irrigation canals, and a bunch of fucking farmers. The best intel fuckup Ray had heard about, that they’d conquered the city of Marjah way back when, when nobody had any fucking clue whose boots were where, even Brad and his —

There is no city of Marjah. It’s just a bunch of little villages dotted with Soviet-era infrastructure the locals seem to think is cursed if the attention they pay to it is anything to go by. At least the Americans left canals.

Anyway. Fucking Marjah. It’s a sinkhole for humidity and yet somehow it never fucking rains. The only consolation is that the Russians don’t seem to be having a better time, but then, they never do. There’s three of them and one of him, which is about how it’s gone ever since Ray cottoned on that they had other metahumans around and started asking about them. Rookie move, but in the halcyon days of Ray’s first dozen or so shock-deaths, he still had some idea that they’d put a bid on him for a reason other than he was a useful and completely renewable set of hands. Literally.

It takes about six hours, depending on several mutable factors, for Ray to come fully back to life, but it’s sort of pot-luck what comes back first. Once, Ray had been pretty much awake for most of it, but usually the brain waits until all of the central nervous system is back online to fire up again, and he’s sort of glad about that. In the way that people can be sort of glad for hurricanes instead of tornadoes.

“Not that I’m not into the strong and silent approach, but don’t you think this could have been planned, oh, I dunno, a hundred times better?” Breaking the monotony of walking is always a better shot than just keeping his head down and putting one boot in front of the other. “I mean, think about it, right, we’re here in this shithole because some journalist you don’t like has been poking around _your_ shithole, so you’re just like — okay, we’re gonna kill him—” Ray ignores Polonov’s glare; it’s only late afternoon, and if he wants Ray to do as he’s told he’s going to have to hold off on anything more damaging than the garden variety disciplinary measures. “Except I have to do it because if you take your thumb out of your asshole you’re up shit creek. Am I right? Plausible deniability? Honestly, dude. Everyone’s gonna know it’s you.”

<<If he doesn’t shut up I’m going to choke him,>> Polonov says. Not to Ray, of course.

The other guys murmur assent, ignoring Ray completely. Diaghilev, in sharp contrast to tall, blond Polonov, is only a little taller than Ray, but about three times heavier. Once, he knocked the wind out of him, coming down on the back of his ribs like a tonne of bricks. Ray would resent him, but he had been running at the time, and dropping him with a tackle was considerably more gentle than a shock or a shot. Possibly nobody wanted to do laundry that day, but hey, gift horse.

Ray grins, turning to walk backwards, boots kicking up puffs of dirt. “Look, if you can think of a better way to do this, I’m all ears. How many times have they grown back, by the way? You must have a collection somewhere, some Heart Of Darkness type shit.”

Polonov spits. The third guy looks about nineteen, which means he’s probably twelve. He showed up last week, and Ray hasn’t learned his name yet. Anybody on metahuman detail doesn’t really bother introducing themselves, so it’s just a waiting game until someone slips up and yells at him where Ray can hear.

The collection of shitty houses that passes for a town only seems to come closer by the time the sun is threatening to go down. Ray could have told them the distance on foot was going to take longer given the terrain, and how far out they left the trucks. It wouldn’t have accomplished anything, but he could have. “You realise this violates the Geneva Conventions, right?” Ray sweeps an arm out to take in the negligible skyline, flat-topped beige clay houses and grey antennas against the fading light. “Killing a journalist, that is some shady shit. ‘Non-combatant’ mean anything to you? Clearly not.” Ray glances around, turning back to the road. “And then the Russians said nothing. Jesus. It’s like nobody appreciates political commentary anymore.”

The youngest one speaks up. <<Doesn’t he know Russian?>>

<<He knows it fine.>>

Ray turns back. “Excuse you, Ivan Drago, _I_ do not speak commie, I am a red-blooded American. Who, by the way, is here under duress, so I suggest—”

Polonov sticks a hand in his pocket.

Ray grins. “Yeah, motherfucker. Zap me, see whose hands get dirty if I’m twitching out for the night.”

Polonov grimaces at him, but does nothing else.

“And then the fearless leader showed mercy,” Ray supplies, falling into step just as they reach their operating point.

From here on, it’ll go mostly like this: Ray will be supplied a weapon, and escorted by one or more handlers to the line of sight. Once whoever is in for a murder is close enough, Ray will go in alone, looking innocuous enough to walk through the door. He will surprise the NATO-invited journalist who’s been doing something a little extracurricular on Russian mercs in the AO near the Kush, and then he will kill him. The actual target varies, but mostly Ray’s function here is to be a foolproof murder weapon, because hey, surprise! Nobody can fucking kill him. At least, not for long.

Once, the little tribal get-together he’d walked into had ended with a bunch of 39mm slugs leaking out of his chest for a day, which was fun. “Minimal yaw.” Ray laughs, remembering an old brief on wound profiles from AKs.

<<What—>>

<<Ignore it.>> Diaghilev drops the gear bag, crouching to unzip it. Polonov steps out of Ray’s reach, watching him very, very carefully.

Ray sighs and sticks his hands up. “Stalin over here thinks if I don’t assume the position every time there’s a gun in sight I’ll do something crazy, like kill a civilian.” He shoots a meaningful look at the new kid, who is watching from just past arm’s length, throat working above his dusty shirt. “Don’t look so scared, homes. All’s fair, right?” Diaghilev pokes him in the chest with the butt of a Makarov. Ray grins at him. “Ah, sending a message tonight, are we? Ballistics are gonna go ballistic for that one.” Silence, of course.

Diaghilev rolls his eyes. Ray’s got the pistol checked by the time Diaghilev points him down the street at the house.

Ray knows from painful experience what the operating radius of the damn electric collar remote is, because he’s fast, but he’s not half a kilo in seconds fast. The target is about 300 metres away, which is why they’ve been walking all fucking afternoon. Dropping a helo right into Marjah would have attracted a hell of a lot of attention. If this whoever-the-fuck journalist had half a brain or a shred of situational awareness he’d have called transport and gotten out of there.

Unluckily for him, foot mobiles in farm country aren’t exactly news, even if one of them is blond as hell. Ray almost feels sorry for the guy he’s going to have to kill that the last place he’ll be alive is some nothing town in a part of Afghanistan nobody really cares about anymore. He’s out of the Kush, which might have seemed like a good idea at the time, but at least in the mountains there’s somewhere to hide. In theory. Not that Ray would know. Mostly he’s seen the inside of a storage room with a bare bulb and no windows. Those look pretty much the same worldwide.

Ray whistles a little as he walks down the street, because it would drive the Russians crazy. It’s nightfall and people are doing whatever it is people do when they start going home. Eating, probably. Nobody pays much attention to him, or at least they do him the courtesy of ignoring him.

The street is narrow, this far into town, buildings close together, garbage piled up in corners and alleys, a few thin, rangy-looking cats prowling around the heaps.

The door has a lock, but that poses about as much of a problem as a ‘No Girls Allowed’ clubhouse sign. Ray looks around, shrugs, and kicks it in. Saves time.

The first guy down the stairs couldn’t scream ‘bodyguard’ any louder if he were actually screaming it, but Ray drops him before he can say anything. They always look so surprised. Ray would too, honestly. “I know, dude. I’m not even in uniform.”

Shaking his head, he goes up the stairs. Half of him expects a rush, but it’s quieter than a church on Sunday until he gets to the upstairs room and is greeted by a burst of semiautomatic fire. “That’s rude!” he informs whoever is shooting at him. Luckily, it’s pretty hard to aim through a fucking door. Ray rolls his eyes and shoulders it open, old wood creaking against its hinges.

Nobody screams, which makes a nice change, but the guy who shot him is clearly not a journalist. For one thing, he’s handling the gun like he knows what he’s doing, which is not really a journalist thing. For another, there’s a woman behind him looking healthily terrified, which is something Ray would have really, really liked to know beforehand.

“Well, this is gonna suck for all of us,” he says, briefly considering just not doing it. It wouldn’t do anything except get him a few days with a bag duct taped over his head, and last time Ray had just spent all his oxygen cursing so he’d pass out faster. That was the pinnacle of accomplishment.

Ray gets shot in the chest again, burst catching him across the left side. It hurts like fuck, but doesn’t drop him so much as roll him back, surprised. “Hey! Look, let’s make this easier, okay? It’ll be fast, I promise.”

It’s about as much as he can get out, because one of his lungs is deflating like an old balloon, and that sucks. Ray coughs a glob of blood, raises the Makarov and fires. Twice for him, once for her. It seems like enough.

He stands there for a second, thinking about what the likelihood is of someone rushing in to see what all the gunfire is all about, but this is Afghanistan. If he’s not back in — he looks at his watch — shit, five minutes, Polonov’s gonna come get him. Ray looks at the Makarov. “You’re no help,” he says to it, flicking the safety on and off. “If I ate you I’d just shit you out in the morning.”

He doesn’t look at the corpses on his way out. Sometimes it’s just easier not to. Ray staggers back to the Russians, gasping as his lung suddenly decides to reinflate, shoving an unpleasant amount of fluid up his throat and out. Ew. The youngest one opens the door. Ray thinks it’s a little much how white he goes, considering Ray’s the one who just shot three people, but hey, that’s why they pay him _nothing at all._

“Honey. I’m home.” Ray tosses the gun at him. “Dinner better be on the table.”

The kid catches it, shooting a panicked glance at Polonov. <<Should we — he’s bleeding.>>

Ray looks down. The whole left side of his shirt is a mess, ripped and red where the bullets smashed his ribs. There’s a hole in his left biceps, closing as he watches. “Looks like they really went through with it,” he mutters, starting to laugh. “Check it out, dude.” He peeks through it, arm held out at an angle. “That’s fucking hilarious. Spend enough time around holy warriors!”

He doesn’t get to finish the thought, too caught in the process of healing to stop laughing. He ends up on his back on the floor of the operation-base, a tiny hut near the town border, looking up at the ceiling through the hole in his arm as it finally closes all the way. “What was that? Four minutes?”

<<Get him moving, Bulygin,>> Polonov says, bored.

“You’re no fun,” Ray informs him, rolling to his feet before anyone can touch him. He winks at the kid — Bulygin, ha — who actually recoils. Baby. Ray might have said that out loud, if the look the kid gives him is an indicator. Oh well.

It’s only a minute later that they’re on the move. The walk back seems to take longer than the walk out, but Ray can’t be bothered to identify if it’s boredom or fatigue. Either way, he’d tell them what a bullshit idea it is to take the same route to the victors, but if he’s learned anything recently it’s that fuckery is universal and no divine mistake is going to take these assholes out. They’re like cockroaches, probably.

Ray might survive a nuke if he wasn’t blown to atoms, but he wouldn’t put money on being the only one.

-

**February, 2006**

The drive to their destination is through a landscape so static and unchanging Brad would think it’s one long tedious dream, were it not for Miller’s tone-deaf attempts at making Kurt Cobain seem downright sophisticated and the occasional crackle of white noise from radios that work about a third of a time, and then only with Kocher doing advanced yoga with the antenna in the passenger seat. Who’d have thunk, UHF really does prove next to useless in a largely mountainous terrain.

Three klicks out of their target zone, they pass a blown out T-62 tank. It stands in rusted green glory against the backdrop of jagged mountain edges in the near distance, overgrown with moss. Brad recognises the heavy machine gun as an antique. It has yellowish weeds poking out of the barrel, a halfway fossilised remnant of the last war, a reckoning thirty years in the waiting. The armed leftovers in Iraq were from the early 90s, at least. The T-62 they pass here probably remembers Brezhnev. Martinez drives past without sparing it a second look.

The base itself, when they near it, looks about the same: a number of squat, derelict single story buildings plucked directly out of the late 70s with all the colour left behind and enough bullet holes in the limewashed walls to qualify as air conditioning. No signs of advanced navigation systems, a single radio tower ready to topple under its own ancient weight.

Unexploded ordnance litters the dirt road leading to the base, but they take a sharp left turn onto higher ground north of the perimeter before the proximity can become a double-edged sword. They set up camp two klicks out, elevated but unobtrusive, in a nest of gravel leftover from a landslide and enough ferns that one of them will undoubtedly turn up an inconvenient fucking rash. Miller and Lee drag their gear out of the humvee to move as close as possible to the base, Miller with his AWM wrapped tightly in its cover, Lee carrying the rangefinder under one arm. Brad is rolling a camo net over the humvee when they check back in, having set up a sniper position at a maximum effective distance.

The weather is good for a clean, straight shot, if one is needed.

Hours tick past in tense monotony of combat readiness: any given moment, one after another, could be the one to tip the scales directly and inexorably into chaos. Zero to wildfire, point second flat, and nothing to save them but wits and training.

The sun is beginning its ascent over the horizon, throwing sloping shadows cast in burnished gold, when there is a muffled noise from the humvee. It sounds victorious, so Brad doesn’t rush to leave his position monitoring the southbound route for signs of activity. As soon as he’s within indoors-voice range, Kocher waves him over.

“Come on. You gotta hear this.”

He’s leaned across the driver’s side door. Inside, Martinez is half bent over the radio, legs sticking out of the door, trailing wires. Brad is about to ask — first check-in with headquarters should consist of a more substantial report, and Miller and Lee are still scoping out the base — but before he can open his mouth, the radio spits out a burst of static, like the offkey hum of machine gun fire, before coalescing into words. Male voice, bored but diligent in the particular way of all radio operators the world over.

Another voice, more distinct. Its owner speaks with an uncaring laziness that blurs his words together. Even if they both took pains to enunciate clearly, Brad’s Russian is limited to having memorised their phonetic alphabet during a NATO training exercise in Norway, just in case.

He looks at Kocher, eyebrows raised, waiting for an explanation.

“Martinez tapped into their comms. They’re using old GRU encryption codes.”

“And how does Martinez know GRU encryption codes?”

Kocher shrugs, visibly fighting a grin. “Everybody needs a hobby.”

“So it’s Russians, but not military, if they’re using outdated codes. No UN oversight and I’m guessing fuck all in terms of ISAF even knowing they’re here.” He laughs, runs one hand over his hair. “The Cold War ended ten fucking years ago, didn’t they get the memo?”

“I’m gonna run this by headquarters, see what shakes out,” says Kocher. “Miller and Lee?”

“Yeah. I’ll check on them.”

Miller and Lee, it turns out, are balls-deep in long range surveillance. When Brad gets to their position, skidding across gravel and trying not to brain himself on shifting bits of rock, Lee is glued to his binoculars and Miller to the scope of his rifle. Brad announces his presence by scuffing his boots over the ground, and pats Lee low on the back before settling in next to them, flat on his stomach, his own binoculars in hand.

“Hey, Brad. Kenny thinks it’s some merc auxiliaries or PMCs,” Miller offers, unmoving.

“Makes sense. Martinez got into their comms. Russians from the sound of it.”

“Think there’s a dead guy outside,” says Lee. “Could be garbage bags, though. No other activity so far, but there’s five inside coming up on thermals. One victor, but there’s gotta be more coming and going.”

Brad scans the compound. It takes four seconds to spot the body-or-garbage, a dark shape slumped against a wall and drowning in a patch of shadow, the sun too low to be of any help, but then — there. Movement, faint but unmistakeable, and the indistinct shape takes on some logic, some method. There’s a circular stain radius in the dirt next to the body, the shade of rusted red familiar. A spot of black where the head should be, a bag or something, confusing from a distance but obvious once he sees it, like an optical illusion puzzle. Stare long enough and you can’t unsee it. Brad breathes out, blinks twice. Still not garbage. He says, “That one’s still alive.”

Next to him Lee shifts, readjusting his scope. “What? Oh, shit, yeah. I see it. Should we—?”

“This isn’t a search and rescue mission, Sergeant. Keep your eyes on the fucking compound.”

The sun crawls across the sky by increments, warmth permeating Brad’s already sweated-through fatigues, and he lets himself drift into the alert half-doze of surveillance, monotony broken up by the occasional radio check-in with Kocher and Martinez. Headquarters is cross-referencing their information with military intelligence, apparently.

Spread out flat on the ground he feels more than hears the approaching vehicles, an insistent thrum of engines. He adjusts his binoculars until they catch on a faint cloud of dust, about twelve or thirteen hundred metres out at a glance. “Lee, get on the rangefinder.”

“Roger that. Hold on, hold on…yeah. Two unidentified victors coming in from the south at forty miles per hour, ETA is like two mikes.”

Two minutes later on the dot, the vehicles pull up to the southernmost building, next to the rusty radio tower. The men who step out move like military; armed, uniformed, all their faces obstructed by scarves and goggles. Not brain-dead, then. They have no identifying insignia, but Brad wasn’t expecting any. What he isn’t expecting, either, are the four people who get hustled out the backs of the victors. Hands bound at their fronts, bags over their heads, all practically screaming ‘civilian noncombatant’. At least none are women or children, Brad thinks, keeping his breathing timed with Miller’s.

The civilians are led inside. It’s all the intel Brad needs to give back to headquarters and receive a concrete objective in return. He shifts backwards, and up to his knees once he’s out of sight.

“Brad. Brad, it’s a fucking meta.”

He drops back into the dirt like a puppet with cut strings, pulse jumping in his neck. He grabs Lee’s offered binoculars. Going on instinct, he focuses on where the mostly-dead body was; he’d thought there was too much blood for it to still be moving, and he was right. One of the mercenaries stands over the body, now, Uzi in one hand, suppressor screwed onto the still-smoking barrel. There’s fresh blood. One of the legs is twisted at a macabre angle.

The merc puts a bullet in the guy’s other kneecap. The muffled shot doesn’t even make it across the distance: Brad only knows what happened from the sudden spatter of blood across dirt, an almost perfect half moon, and the bound guy convulsing once, twice, as though going into shock. His bag-covered head twitches sideways, like he’s trying to look at the man who shot him. There might be words exchanged. Brad watches blood seep into the ground.

Still, other than the guy’s sheer resilience, none of it looks particularly metahuman. Brad opens his mouth to say so.

The guy with shot-through kneecaps stands up. He sways, a little, but doesn’t fall.

He makes his way inside without limping even fucking once, into the same building the civilians were taken to, with the mercenary’s Uzi pointed squarely between his shoulder blades.

“Miller,” Brad barks, blindly rooting around the sniper team’s gear for thermals. “Get headquarters on the hook, tell ‘em what we saw. Mercenary combatants, four possible civilian hostages, confirmed metahuman element. And fucking double-time it, Corporal.”

Miller doesn’t need to be told twice. Brad listens to his fading footsteps, but keeps all of his focus on the compound. A thermal scan turns up little of interest, save that it’s probably some kind of interrogation.

Seconds trickle past, bleeding into minutes. The sunburn on the back of Brad’s neck itches in the growing late afternoon chill. He starts humming tonelessly, _if you like piña coladas, getting caught in the rain, if you’re not into yoga, if you have half a brain_. Lee snickers but doesn’t join in, and Brad is too far into the almost supernatural pre-battle calm, every sense sharpened and directed at a single objective, to be disappointed, to miss —

His radio makes a sound like a dog getting strangled, and spits out Kocher’s voice. “Dropkick Actual, this is Dropkick, over.”

“Send it.”

“You are cleared to engage the metahuman element. Do not engage non-meta enemy combatants. Echo 4 Mike is en route to your position. Air strike is on standby for laser designation. How copy?”

“Solid copy. Out.” He turns off the radio. “Miller’s on his way back. We’re gonna schwack the meta, paint the compound for the Cobras and RTB.”

“Roger that.”

Brad keeps his breathing even and his eyes glued to the base. He doesn’t think about the civilians inside, the indistinct shapes carved into the thermal scan in blue and red and yellow; he doesn’t think about the Uzi pointed at the meta’s back to force him to put one foot in front of the other. He does wonder if a single shot will be enough to put him down, since shot kneecaps didn’t take. The air is growing cooler around them. No wind, just an eerie silence frozen in time.

“I got movement at my eleven o’clock. Two footmobiles. Shit, it’s the meta. Where the _fuck_ is Miller?”

Brad adjusts his binoculars. It isn’t the same mercenary he saw earlier: this one is shorter, same height as the meta. He stands in the doorway and lights a cigarette. The meta walks further out, the bag over his head replaced now with a scarf and goggles. He could be any of the other Russians, now, but the legs of his fatigues are soaked with blood at knee height. He stands there like he doesn’t have a care in the world, and Brad is morbidly curious about what a bulletproof mutant might look like up close.

The merc disappears back inside the building. The meta stands directly in Brad’s line of sight. It’s a perfect fucking shot.

“Fuck it,” Brad mutters. “I’m going for it.” He crawls over to Miller’s abandoned rifle. It puts him half in Lee’s personal space, and breathing in sync is as easy as slipping into a second skin, one that fits better than any other.

“You sure, Sarge?”

“Yeah. Spot me.” He gets on the AWM. Lee directs him in a lifeless, monotone voice. The meta stands unmoving until Brad has it — has him — in his sights, and it’s quick work to get the centre of mass in his crosshairs. The scope digs into his cheekbone. Brad keeps breathing, slowly, in and out, waiting for the right moment; the right exhale.

The meta pulls down his scarf. Brad stops breathing.

It’s a shit angle, the guy’s face distorted through the scope, but for a split second his profile is so viscerally familiar Brad almost bites through his tongue. Straight nose, square chin, that cast to the eyes visible even through opaque goggles, but the level of detail seems wrong, as though Brad’s memory is overlaying what he sees, a clarity too sharp to be anything but a mirage, hunger and exhaustion and stress making themselves known in a brief moment of hesitation. Person is in Cali, or Missouri, or someplace else entirely. There is an ocean and most of two continents between them, and it’s not his torso that Brad has in his sights. A shiver like the drag of wire crawls down his spine, and he blinks past the not-right, not-possible feeling lodged in his throat.

“Sergeant?”

He pulls the trigger. Over eight hundred metres, but the weather is perfect: he doesn’t miss. The casing scalds the shell of his ear, hot metal on chilled skin. Brad doesn’t twitch. The meta stumbles, but doesn’t fall. Brad puts another bullet in his chest and, when the meta just staggers back but still remains upright, Brad adjusts his angle for a headshot.

The body drops, most of the head gone in a spray of blood and brain matter. No profile left to seem familiar. It’s over.

Brad moves as if through a daze: disassemble the rifle, wrap it back in the cover, with Lee talking, low, next to him. The words don’t really register save for a background hum of white noise. Brad didn’t lose his shit the first time he killed someone, not then and not at any other point. The only thing that stops him from dropping to all fours and emptying his stomach now is his rank, the two mostly-green corporals on his team, Lee walking at his side, and the possibility of someone finding out. _Hey, you’re not gonna believe this, Iceman puked after he shot a guy, straight up pussy bitch freaked out like a fucking POG_. He keeps walking.

Back at camp, Miller is sitting in the back of the humvee with his legs dangling outside, pressing a ball of cloth to the right side of his face. Kocher stands above him like a dog on watch duty.

“Corporal Miller slipped and fell,” he says, absolutely deadpan in the particularly serene way that means he already mocked the fuck out of Miller.

Brad snorts. “Jesus christ. You need medical attention, Corporal?” Miller shakes his head, mute. “Good. Martinez, grab the laser designator. I want us oscar mike before these jokers put two and two together.”

-

“One day,” Ray had said, months and months and months ago when the Earth was young and he was still mostly sort of new to getting his jaw regularly shattered to smithereens, like practical effects in shitty eighties horror flicks where everybody got killed so easy they might have been made of plasticine. He’d said, “One day I’m going to kill you.”

He’d enunciated and all. His second grade homeroom teacher would have been proud.

It fucking sucks to come back to life thinking about the way Ms Driver would sweat through her floral print top in the sweltering summer heat, but there are degrees of unfairness Ray has been discovering in the past eighteen months that he never dreamed of before, and in the grand scheme of things he decides it’s better to remember Ms Driver than dwell on the precise, nut-busting ache of growing a solar plexus from fucking scratch.

Better than teeth. One after another, sharp needlepoint puncture, and Ray doesn’t blame tiny kids for screaming their little heads off when it happens to them. He’d be screaming his own damn head off were it not for Larry, Curly and Moe — or Boris, Ivan and Sasha, or whatever, as the case may be — breathing down his metaphorical neck across the literal wall. That, and his vocal cords are only now and very slowly coming back online. Secondary necessities, probably; way more important to rewire a brain, to reattach optical nerves. He has to learn all over again how to inflate and deflate his lungs. He’s shaking as it all comes back, shaking like there are LAVs rolling across the new bones of his skull, like a newborn pony.

He never had to come back from getting his brains blown out all over the dirt. Maybe he was hoping he wouldn’t. Maybe he was hoping it would be good, it would be fitting, that glint off a rifle scope winking at him, death playing coy, all heat and come-hither at the end of the tunnel. Maybe he’s a moron undeserving of the air he breathes, to think it could all be so easy.

He stops breathing for ten minutes. His new lungs burn. He passes out, then comes back up with a small, involuntary gasp. Presses the heels of his palms against his eyes, and doesn’t, doesn’t scream himself into unconsciousness when he can’t feel a single trace of the entry wound where the bullet got him straight through the eye socket.

He opens his mouth to fill the silence in the empty room, hear sound bouncing off the four concrete walls so he doesn’t have to hear the sounds of his ribs mending. No words come out.

His handlers didn’t bother to take off any of his gear. What’s left of his scarf has bits of brain on it, and he cuts himself on a skull shard, pulling it off. His shirt has two perfect round holes where the bullets went in, sticking to his skin with sweat and dried blood. He drags it over his head and off, licks his palm and rubs at where the entry wounds should be on his chest. Not a scratch. Came out on the other side of the mercy seat, burning and unafraid.

It’s automatic, reaching out to hook his fingers in the collar, but his hand closes on air and nothing else. His knuckles brush against unresisting flesh.

Ray slowly wraps both hands around his throat, bare and uncollared, naked and horribly vulnerable. It must have gotten blown off along with his head. He lies back down on the bare floor, twists around to feel concrete on the back of neck, stone on his spine, and very distinctly thinks: _holy motherfucking pole-dancing coke-snorting christ on a cracker_. He stares at the ceiling, all the cracks in it counted, all the dust in every crevice he knows like the lines of his palms.

There might be a moment where he hyperventilates, with black spots dancing in front of his eyes, tiny black spots, like bullet holes in his vision. If the strangled breaths he forces past clenched teeth are wet around the edges, if they come out as sobbing gasps that just make his brand new chest ache, no one will ever be the wiser. Him, in particular. Ray giggles. It sounds hysterical to his own ears, but what do his ears know? They’ve been around for an hour, if that. He’s fucking entitled to mild hysteria, besides. He’s fucking —

He’s free.

Eighteen months since the project had sold him to the Russians; however many before then, in that goddamn facility, getting his physiology rewired one death at a time. Macon and Baker. All that fucking snow, deaf and uncaring.

He’s free.

It’s like a switch going off. Ray is on his feet in a point second flat: an electrocution metaphor waiting to be made, with how high he jumps, but he won’t be making any of those until his next dying breath at least, and if he never gets even static shock for the rest of his life, it will be too soon. He doesn’t clean himself up. It would take hours to scrape the old blood from his skin. He doesn’t want to start out his new life getting clean; that train’s left the station.

All he wants is to be gone, baby, but with a crack of clarity that is nothing short of miraculous, at this point in his undeath, Ray knows there is something he has to do before he splits. Blow this popsicle stand, something echoes in his head, but he doesn’t voice that thought, or any of the ones that follow.

One of the lovely, lovely sounds he makes ends up alerting whoever is on guard duty at the door. He bangs his fist against it and yells out an order that Ray elects to ignore on account of language barriers and culture clash.

Five minutes later the door opens. Polonov and Bulygin, walk in. Bulygin is holding his rifle like it could save him, and Ray wonders again how old he is, then stops. He’s old enough to duct-tape a plastic bag over another guy’s head, and that makes him old enough to die, really.

<<Don’t stand there like an idiot,>> Polonov barks at the kid, waiting for him to heft his rifle higher before he approaches Ray with simple metal handcuffs. <<He twitches, shoot him. No difference if he makes it to home base dead.>>

Home base: that’s a phrase Ray hasn’t heard in several weeks, and only then in the midst of having to listen to the Russians complaining about the superior facilities. The handcuffs are telling, too. There is only one reason his handlers might need to move him without arming him, first, and that reason is patently obvious in the empty air clinging to his bare neck. Leashes and fucking collars; Ray is done. Tracking Polonov’s progress across the room he’s come to consider his, he thinks of dogs that bite the hands that keep them.

He doesn’t move until Polonov is close enough to backhand him across the face, hard enough that Ray’s head snaps back and he sees stars. The magic really has gone out of this relationship. Nothing couple’s therapy couldn’t fix, but then, where would he get a good therapist out here? No skin off his back, either way, save for how he knows exactly what it feels like to have his back flayed.

There has got to be a song about this. There’s got to be something appropriate. Ray wonders if he’s forgotten how to speak entirely. If ever there was an appropriate time for running commentary —

He stands with his feet a shoulder width apart and looks up at Polonov, tall and looming. He works his jaw: nothing broken. Shame, almost. When Polonov raises his hand to subdue him, Ray grabs his wrist, cat-fast, running on a low simmer of fury.

A human wrist has eight carpal bones, and two long bones of the forearm. Polonov snarls at him, but Ray is angrier, and with one twist and one push and one crack that’s like Christmas morning he breaks Polonov’s arm at the elbow.

Bulygin starts firing.

He shoots out the lightbulb first, and the room plunges into darkness. It makes no difference: Ray pulls Polonov towards him, using his weight, and down to the floor. Bullets are flying, above and to the sides and burying in the soft flesh of his centre of mass, but he slams Polonov’s face into the concrete and it feels almost good. Once, twice, four times, silence in the room save for the thick squelch of meat and bone breaking over the floor, eight times, nine: Ray’s Wheaties must have had a little something something in them, he can’t stop. The body under him stops spasming first.

So _that’s_ what getting beaten to death looks like, from this side. Ray spits out blood, smears whatever shit is on his face out of his eyes, and doesn’t wait to puke up the bullets Bulygin put in him. Who’s got time to chill, when the chill don’t pay? He drags himself off of Polonov’s corpse and leaves him his sidearm. Takes the handcuffs.

He’s had the compound layout memorised from day one, with nothing better to do between getting creatively dismembered and ordered to kill. Makes him want to holler, but it’s almost better to keep mum. He knocks out every light he passes.

Come out, he singsongs inside his head to the captivated audience of one, come out, wherever you are.

The corridor lights up with muzzle flashes, bright and loud and perfect cover. Ray dives to the side. Training comes back to him like it’s never left, and he’s painting trajectories, the predictable patterns. When in doubt, empty the magazine. Once you fire a bullet, James.

Oh, he misses firing bullets that don’t go into civilians. He doesn’t miss being target practice. He stays crouched close to the wall, one foot in front of the other, and if there’s one good thing about the tiny little twist of genetics that gave him a meta gene, it’s that people who don’t have it tend to go from polite fucking society to pants-shitting terror at the sight of people who do.

Ray grins, both hands pressed flat to the cold wall, vision exploding in blinding gunfire bursts. The bullet in his right lung is crawling up, up and soon to be ejected. No space for passengers left on this ride.

Ray knows Bulygin only by height, with everything amped up and hella fucking exploding, Diaghilev behind the firing squad, and three men he hasn’t seen before, won’t see again.

Long range weapons are useless in close quarters, in the dark, against one angry bulletproof meta. As soon as he’s close enough, Ray grabs Bulygin’s AK out of his hands, hot barrel burning right through the skin of his palms down to the meat. He manages to jam the muzzle into the hollow of Bulygin’s throat, in no mood to listen to screaming and crying, and the kid goes down choking. The rest turn on Ray. They massacre him. He massacres them right back, with a single-minded purpose he didn’t know was in him, an attention to detail he could have used in Iraq, with visual stimuli processed through a fog of slow-motion snapshots.

Someone ends up with an arm torn off his body. Someone else gets a mouthful of Uzi and the back of his head pops like an overripe fruit, squishy grey matter and blood disappearing in the darkness, and Ray sympathises, he’s been there, it sucks.

He can’t grin. He tries, and fails.

Diaghilev is last, nothing but a hunting knife to protect him, a long silhouette backlit by the open doorway. The moon is out. Ray body-checks him, gets one hand twisted behind him and the other around Diaghilev’s throat; gets a fresh new smile carved across his neck, for the one he can’t pull across his mouth; gets a solid grip on Diaghilev’s trachea, presses down with all of his weight, weak from every bullet hole. The blood from his cut throat sprays Diaghilev in the face until all that is visible are the whites of his eyes, flashing bright and terrified in the moonlight. Ray frees his other hand. Mouth or eyes, mouth or eyes, mouth or eyes — fuck it.

Diaghilev’s last breath is a scream as he gets Ray’s thumb and index finger down his eye sockets.

“Eye for an eye,” Ray says, in a voice so hoarse it could crumble on a breeze. His breath catches on a laugh. Diaghilev has nothing to contribute to the conversation, so Ray stands on legs that shake only a little, wipes his hands on his pants and takes a look around, unsupervised for the first time in a long time. First time in this life. He’s practically a virgin.

It’s dark in the specific way only middle of nowhere shitholes can get dark at night, an all-consuming thickness of the sky he remembers from the middle of nowhere shithole he called his home (sister-fucking basement-dwelling inbred country-singing hicksville shithole, yeah, yeah, shut up, Bradley; that glint off that scope, tick tick tick boom, that’s all, folks!). The compound is a solid two days away from an urban centre. If Ray legs it, his feet will bleed. He’s looking forward to the new experience. He giggles, again, and shakes himself all over, shedding dry flakes of blood like an old skin.

Say whatever you want: the Hindu Kush is fucking beautiful.

He takes in a breath deep enough it burns, burns, dust and dirt down his throat. He holds it for five seconds, then screams it out until he can hear the sound return doubled as it echoes across the wide open landscape. Once he stops, the silence that follows feels twice as heavy.

“Okay, better now,” he says to no one in particular, and starts walking.


	2. Chapter 2

**May, 2004**

It’s not even fourteen hundred hours when he gets to the bar — two in the afternoon, he corrects himself, editorialising in the privacy of his own brain — but it’s got to be five o’clock somewhere. It could be five in Iraq, and since Ray left something there that he isn’t sure he will ever be getting back, even when all his paperwork comes through and the Corps hands him his brain and lateral thinking and sparkling intellect back, all wrapped like a shitty present with a bow on top, well, no one would fault him for sticking to an in-country drinking schedule.

It isn’t like anyone who matters would know, and that is its own incentive to take the small step and giant leap for the collective mankind of alcoholic shitbags everywhere.

Ray is still hungover from last night. It’s a good state of being: it reminds him that there are worse feelings than standing in the breakfast foods aisle for thirty minutes, staring at shelves of whole grain gluten free chocolate chip cereal like some asshole taken straight out of a post-combat reintegration brochure. Put it in a fucking Oscar bait, Spielberg. Ray won’t be going back to that particular Wal-Mart for the time being.

He doesn’t remember the name of the woman behind the bar, even though she must have told it to him last night when he was trying to cop a feel before getting kicked out. (The bouncer, it turned out, didn’t want his dick touched, either.) She looks at him as if she’d like to put his face under the bar tap and drown him in shitty microbrew, but Ray throws a couple of bills on the counter in self-defence.

“Starting bright and early today,” she says, not sounding particularly interested. She doesn’t ask for Ray’s order, just reaches for a clean glass and fixes him a vodka and coke.

Ray shrugs. “Gotta maintain a standard of self-care and shit.”

“Someone was looking for you a while back, guy in a suit.” She lifts her gaze to Ray at those last words, wary interest peeking out from under layers of boredom and contempt.

“Yeah? He say why?”

“Didn’t ask.”

She keeps looking at him, and Ray doesn’t want to give her the satisfaction of admitting his own interest, so he grabs his vodka and stalks off to the farthest table in the farthest corner of the bar, where the cigarette smoke is thicker than rush hour smog. Ray settles in with his back to the wall and all exit routes in sight, and slides on a pair of sunglasses he found, like a blessing or a sign from on high, next to his face when the bouncer had tossed him headfirst into the alley behind the bar.

It takes an hour before the guy walks in, suit and tie and a face that is just unfortunate, like something out of a Nick Cave ballad: boiled meat skin, beady eyes, the works. He would fit right in with the early drinker crowd, sporting a face like that, but he moves with purpose, and having any kind of aim puts him above and beyond the bar’s usual clientele. He doesn’t bother hiding clear distaste when he steps on something that crunches loudly under his boot. Ray watches it all as he brings the glass to his mouth and doesn’t take a sip.

The guy walks over to the counter. The woman behind the bar — Sheila? Sherry? Fucking Shakira? — is smart enough to rope him into getting a beer and paying for it before she jerks one thumb in Ray’s direction, boom, headshot. Ray wants to mime getting shot, sprawl back with a hand over his bleeding heart, but there is a nervous, angry buzz under his skin and he can’t be bothered.

Instead, he takes the opportunity to spread his knees and lean back in his seat, letting some of the vodka and coke trickle out of the glass and down his shirt, a completely fucking uninviting picture. If it doesn’t work, he’s ready to scratch his balls and smell his hand, really ham it up.

“That looks painful,” says the guy as soon as he sits down in the empty seat across from Ray. He gestures at the dark bruises over the slope of Ray’s neck, where the bouncer grabbed him last night.

“Ain’t no thing.” Ray traces the lip of his glass with one index finger, gathering condensation that is the only proof his vodka wasn’t lukewarm when he got it. When silence stretches and the suit doesn’t show any intention of leaving, Ray sighs, downtrodden and dramatic. “Dude, look, I know this—” he gestures, vaguely, at his face and then at his crotch “—can be very confusing and arousing to a distinguished older homosexual like yourself, but I’m seriously not interested in sucking your cock or holding your hand at a Shania Twain gig, so scram.”

The man listens without blinking more often than necessary, expression carved into impassive nonchalance. He’s bad at it: Ray can see the tiniest twitch in his jaw, and his voice has gone a little pissy when he says, “My name is Murtaugh.”

With a name to put to the severely objectionable face, Ray lets himself entertain a brief fantasy of smashing Murtaugh’s beer bottle on the table and shoving the glass in his mouth. The sweaty condensation on his own glass sticks to his palm. He wipes his hand on his jeans.

“Yeah? Well, my name’s not Riggs. Fuck do you want?”

The twitch returns, blink and you’ll miss it, but Ray doesn’t miss anything. Then Murtaugh smooths his face out as far as genetics allow, and gives Ray something that could, in the mouth of a toothless shark, be a smile.

“Corporal Josh Ray Person,” he says, and Ray is suddenly glad to be wearing sunglasses. He’s too hung the fuck over to deal with surprises today, but Murtaugh just keeps gunning for the gold: “Lately of the Marine Corps 1st Reconnaissance Battalion. Now…” He looks around at the bar, back again at Ray, at the bruises and the threadbare, dirty shirt. It’s the kind of look that speaks volumes, speaks for itself, and Ray doesn’t like any of the things it says. Most of them he has thought already.

“Nice trick, dickwad. What, you steal my credit card, get your rocks off? Sorry to break it to you, homes, but I got shit all in my bank account.”

“That much is obvious, Corporal.” No one has used Ray’s rank in a few weeks; he made an effort to avoid those people that might. It doesn’t sound as alien as he hoped it would, rolling off a stranger’s tongue. “It’s partly why I’m here. That, and this.” He puts a briefcase on top of the table; Ray doesn’t tell him he had better disinfect it later. Takes out a manila folder, slides the briefcase aside, leaves the folder sitting between him and Ray like it could bite. It’s stamped with the USMC logo.

With Murtaugh sitting back like a smug and satisfied bulldog, Ray does the one thing he knows he’s supposed to do and is too morbidly curious to be contrary about: he nudges the folder open with his thumb and index finger, as if handling week old come-stained panties, and skims the first page upside down.

“It’s your medical file,” Murtaugh offers. “Up to date as of your last mandatory physical.”

“I’ve got eyes, I know what the fuck it is.”

“Then it can’t have escaped your notice that you’re a dormant metahuman gene carrier.”

“Jesus motherfuck,” says Ray. He tastes every vowel twice over the regular length, scrubbing his hands across his face and over hair that is beginning to grow out of regulation. “That’s what this is about? I know the braindead retards in charge frown on mutants in active combat, but seriously, go yank some other dude by the dick. I didn’t break any goddamn regs. It’s dormant. Says so right there.”

“You don’t get it, do you.” Murtaugh pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m not here to bust your balls for not registering, Corporal, I’m here to offer you a chance to take your useless dormant gene and make it active. Do something useful with this glorious ex-marine life you’re wasting so far.”

Ray downs the rest of his vodka. It burns as it goes down, and he slams the empty glass on the table, crosses his arms across his chest. “I’m not going back. That was sort of the fucking point of leaving the Corps.”

“You wouldn’t go back to the Corps. We recruit promising gene carriers like you and allow them to utilise their skills in a more fitting environment. Think special operations, but with less red tape to smother you. We value our agents’ independence just as much as they do, Corporal.”

“Bullshit. Bull fucking shit. I spent five years of my life in the military,” says Ray, a simmering anger bubbling up to the surface. “Independence does not get valued over there, and when jerkoffs like you fuck grunts like me up the ass, buddy, it’s not with astroglide, it’s with red tape. Cut the party line shit, ‘cause I’m not buying.”

Murtaugh raises his hands, palms up towards Ray like Ray is a dog needing to be placated. The defensive gesture burrows under Ray’s skin and makes him want to start a brawl, walk out of the bar with a broken nose and blood on his teeth and cracked sunglasses hanging off the collar of his t-shirt, get drunk somewhere else and wake up the next day wondering if he left another ill-timed message on Brad’s answering machine that Brad will never acknowledge or respond to.

“No bullshit, Corporal. Private capital, no unnecessary government oversight. Liaising with various military branches — inevitable, most of our operatives are like you, out of service and looking for something better to do with all these skills Uncle Sam paid for.” Murtaugh grins, lips thinning over even teeth, and Ray thinks he could see him in uniform, a decade back. His edges are all dulled with time and misuse. Soon enough, Ray will be on his way there.

“No one holding your dick for you; you’d get to do that all by yourself,” Murtaugh goes on, enjoying his own pitch. “It’s challenging work, Person, but your service record is enough to prove that that’s what you thrive on: doing hard fucking work. It’s why you were selected for the recruitment phase.”

Ray remembers vividly what it felt like, when he was chosen for recon training, the sweat and blood and satisfaction of completing it; he remembers the good fucking work he’d done, before the battalion was sent up shit creek in Iraq and everything went dick over elbow wrong. He remembers what it was like to have a job and be good at it.

He remembers, vividly, that cereal aisle at Wal-Mart.

Murtaugh watches him fight it out in his head, and Ray knows he’s probably a goner too stupid to live, but there’s no one to tell him so, the last of his voicemails left unanswered. He’s always known the Corps would fuck him up and spit him back out all mangled, but the stark reality of his limited options out here in the brave wide civilian world, the past few months just a long, grinding reminder of why the military seemed like a good idea in the first place — fuck, Ray’s had enough. Better the devil he motherfucking knows.

“You got a number I could call or something?” he asks, and accepts the card that Murtaugh hands him, tucks it into the front pocket of his jeans. It has a phone number, and a name, and telling, oh-so-telling words like _industries_ and _security_ and _procurement_. No mention of any Blackwater-type fuckery, but the whole thing is so obviously under the table that the sleaze of it wants to lodge in Ray’s throat like a fish bone.

Outside, he picks up an empty beer bottle just to have something to smash against the brick wall of the bar that isn’t his head, or his fists.

-

**April, 2006**

The shower is so hot Ray thinks he might melt a little. It wouldn’t be much of a problem if he did, but it would hurt like a bitch. Burning always seems to, no matter how varied the method. Still, he reaches for the dial and turns it down a bit, not really expecting it to do anything. 

The water gets cooler, and Ray stares up into it, letting it wash through his eyelashes. 

The shower door is closed, and isn’t that a headfuck, that he keeps looking sideways to see who’s on shower duty. Turns out it’s nobody, which is great, and fantastic, and many other synonyms for _thank fucking christ_ but is somehow still really freaking him out. 

“Told you I’d kill you one day,” he says to the air, a mashup of unfortunately familiar faces taking the brunt of Ray’s I-told-you-so.

He grabs a shower bottle at random, something candy-blue, the kind of blue that only exists on M&Ms and blue Gatorade, and squirts a liberal gush into his hand. It smells like fucking berries. There’s nothing he can really do but laugh, sliding down the shower wall until he’s sitting half under the spray, watching a handful of blue goop dissolve in his palms, foamy blue shit swirling down the drain with all the dirt he’s scraped off. 

Even Brad’s towels are too damn soft. Ray makes himself a towel turban and wraps another one around his waist, choosing the colours to clash, green and faded-orange, a weird mismatch he’d never have pegged for Brad Colbert’s taste if he hadn’t spent years staring at his ridiculous technicolour tattoo. He uses Brad’s toothbrush, figuring he can just buy another one. Plus, it’s not like Ray’s got diseases. 

Looking at himself in the mirror is another trip. He looks pretty much the same, which shouldn’t be a surprise. The foam doesn’t even spit out bloody. “Congrats, asshole,” he says to the air, “you’re living the dream.” His face even moves the same. 

Brad pounds on the door. “Jesus, are you drowning in the toilet? You’ve been in there for an hour.”

Ray grips the sink until his knuckles hurt. The pain is a faint ache, like an echo. “Pissing on your toothbrush takes time! Not all of us have aim like you do, Bradley.”

“Stick it up you ass, clean out all the bullshit while you’re at it.”

Ray laughs, sees himself laughing, puts a finger on the mirror right where his left eye is, the place the bullet went in. “Get in here and do it for me if you’re so interested in my asshole.”

He knows it only takes a second to turn a doorknob, even if you’ve got a hand around your cock, so Brad must be hesitating for some reason. It’s not like Ray hasn’t already thanked him for the favour, so really, Brad must still be freaking out. No reason for it in Ray’s opinion, but some people take a while to adjust. He sticks the toothbrush back in his mouth, just because. 

Finally Brad pushes the door open, leaning in the jamb. “God damn it, Ray. You owe me a new toothbrush.”

“Expense it,” Ray says, grinning around the plastic. The words come out garbled. “I’ll call my secretary.”

Brad gives him a strange look, doing that thing with his face Ray used to know meant he was saying something in his head that made no fucking sense out loud, like _now we’ve got to kill the hornets._ “Spit it out, Iceman. You’re good at that, remember?” Brad swallows, pretty much in direct opposition to what Ray’s just said. “Come on, dude. I’m pretty sure I didn’t dream up Mt. Shasta. It’d be pretty hard to imagine the look on your face when you lost blowjob chicken.”

“Ray.” Brad starts, then stops. 

“For one thing there was a cock in your mouth, which isn’t something I’d have imagined unless I was actively jerking off at the time, and—”

“ _Ray._ ” Brad takes a step into the bathroom. “Shut up.”

Ray looks at him, rinses his mouth out, and puts the toothbrush he’s been waving around down on the sink. “No.”

Brad stops moving. “What are you doing here? Really. And don’t give me some bullshit about—”

Ray’s faster now. He’s not entirely sure why, because he sure as hell isn’t that much stronger, or any brighter. The six million dollar man wasn’t exactly the template. Ray’s more like a dollar special mutant, low-grade, the kind of thing you get when you pump someone full of drugs and stress-test their physiology into rewiring itself. Still, he’s fast enough to beat Brad’s surprise, grabbing him by the back of the neck and pulling him right down. 

Ray’s never kissed him before. Other stuff, sure, but kissing’s for pussies. Right now, he doesn’t care much who it’s for, because it feels pretty good. Brad’s not pulling back, frozen in Ray’s grip, bent at a weird angle, half in the bathroom and half in the hall. Ray could keep going until he suffocates. It’s been a long fucking time since anything felt good. 

Brad starts to gasp, the odd, hitching breath of someone fighting for air, and Ray wants to keep holding, just to see how long he’ll last. Brad’s hand lands on Ray’s back, a little cold after the heat of the shower, scratching for purchase. Ray breaks for air, seeing stars. 

Brad stares at him, looking, for once in his life, totally fucking lost. 

“I just wanted to see what it would feel like,” Ray explains, Brad’s hand still anchored between his shoulder blades. “Turns out you should really shave.” Brad takes a deep breath, clearly about to speak. That’s about what Ray can stand, the proximity, the feeling of clean skin, the breathlessness. “If you freak out you can kill me again. I promise, it won’t take.”

Brad’s nails dig into his back. “I—”

Ray drops the towel. “Be gentle, it’s my first time.”

“Fucking liar,” Brad mutters, sliding a hand up to grip the back of Ray’s skull in one huge palm, squeezing a little right at the base. 

“Not if you count from the last time I came back to life.” Ray catches Brad’s grimace just before he sticks a hand down his pants, figuring if nothing else that Brad’s dick will be in agreement. Wonderful things, dicks. Not a whole lotta judgment from a dick, in general. “I really do wanna thank you,” Ray informs him, before he leans into Brad’s shocked grip and seizes one of his nipples in his teeth, hard even through the fabric of Brad’s threadbare USMC shirt. 

Brad hisses, whole body jerking at the shock. Ray takes that as invitation; he’s been short on anything but demands for more than a year, so he figures he’s due. 

He’d thought he was hallucinating, when he was left alone with a comm stack. Sure, the ache of healing both knees because he hadn’t been quick enough to stand up was distracting, but even that wasn’t quite enough to account for Diaghilev cursing and ducking right out the other side, leaving Ray with a whole handful of electronics in easy reach. 

Really, he’d just clicked it on for fun, cycling through frequencies at three second intervals, hoping to fuck them up so badly they’d take hours to reset. The last thing on the planet he’d expected to hear while cycling through UHF channels were callsigns, the unmistakable crackling of shitty contact, a barely audible _—ed to engage._ The only people actively trying to use UHF in the mountains had to be marines.

Ray could have bought some favour with a warning. If he hadn’t heard the victors pulling in, he might have. 

The waiting game had been the worst, the last eight minutes of his last life dilated through the sound of quickfire Russian, of being shoved into combat readiness, of being dragged back outside without anyone even noticing the comm switched off in the corner. Maybe he’d pulled his scarf down to get a breath of air not dragged through fucking burlap, but maybe it’d been that he’d known any marines that deep would be recon. He definitely felt the shot that killed him, but not before he’d spotted the line and the glint of a sight. Good angle. Not a lot of wind. Only a few people who could take it. 

Ray’s always been good at trial and error. 

Brad’s hand circles the back of his neck, pressing him closer, pulling him up. This time, Brad’s the one who takes a deep breath before he kisses him, kicking the bathroom door shut with a heel and placing his back to it, enough for leverage, enough to hold him up when Ray slips out of his grip and drops to his knees. 

Brad doesn’t say a fucking word. 

Ray sits back on his heels, something in this just not quite right. “No,” he says, narrowing his eyes at Brad’s dick, which is clearly interested. It’s just that this isn’t what he wants. “Fool me once, homes. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m more than ready to put out. It’s just—”

“Ray,” Brad drawls, eyes blue slits, speaking through his teeth. “I never had you pegged as a cocktease.”

Ray stands up, almost flush to Brad’s ventral line, pressing him back into the door. He fastens a hand around Brad’s throat, feeling the pulse thumping under his fingers: one-two, steady and fast. He tightens his hand. Brad gasps, lips peeling back, chest rising against Ray’s once before he steadies, ribs expanding lower, diaphragm flattening completely, breath pooling slow and controlled. A diving breath, Ray thinks. Ready for deep water.

He digs his fingers in. Brad’s eyes close, just as Ray presses closer, just enough to slip a thigh between Brad’s. “Tell me to stop,” Ray says.

Brad shudders. 

Ray forces him down by the throat, and Brad goes. 

When Ray lets him breathe again it’s only for long enough to open his mouth. He’s half sure that Brad will freak out halfway through, that there will be a reflex-bite, some screaming, blood. Instead, it’s devastating. Brad swallows him, even past the point of near-choking. His hands come up to crush bruises into Ray’s hips. “Oh, fuck,” Ray manages, before he catches up with his mouth. That’s exactly what they’re doing. He comes laughing, staring at the top of Brad’s head, at the red flush of his skin and the ugly tiles in his bathroom. 

Brad falls forward, shoving Ray over the toilet until he’s sitting half-sprawled, Brad’s weight over the top of his thighs, his wet, laboured breath ghosting over Ray’s bruised hips. 

“Hey,” Ray says, shoving him a little, grinning, still grinning, “remember how I was a virgin until after Afghanistan last time?” Brad rolls his eyes, getting his breath back. Ray laughs, low. “Once more with feeling.”

Brad closes his eyes again, but this time, the shaking is different, so low that Ray feels it in his legs first, Brad’s weird, half-silent laugh only barely more than a vibration. “You planning to reciprocate, or should I take it that I blew your manners out along with your brain?”

Ray knees him in the chest. “Bradley! I would never have thought you’re such a slut. What would your mother say?”

“Fuck you, Ray.”

Ray thinks about it. “Yeah, okay. Why the fuck not?”

Brad stiffens, holding his breath, staring up at him. 

A second later, he rolls off Ray’s legs, steps over to the shower, and turns on the water. 

Turns out that foamy blue shit is terrible lube, but Ray doesn’t care at all. He’ll heal. It’s worth it for Brad’s hand over his mouth, and for the sound he makes when Ray bites him bloody.

“What the fuck happened to you?” Brad mutters into the back of Ray’s neck, damp, warm weight of him pressed into Ray’s skin.

Ray leans his head against the wall, slick ceramic tile carving a ridge into his forehead. “Cereal aisle at Wal-Mart,” he says. “Then some asshole in a bar.” He pulls back, then drops his forehead right on the same spot, listening to the muffled thump. “Then, boom—” Ray pushes the explosion past his lips, Brad’s blood still lingering in his teeth, “metahuman gene not so dormant anymore. Only, you know, turns out people don’t make superheroes for free.”

Brad drags his uninjured hand over the top of Ray’s head and steps away. “I’ll get the tequila.”

“I hate tequila!” Ray calls after him, watching his ass.

Brad gives him the finger without looking. “Blow me.”

“Don’t front,” Ray yells at his back, “I already know your dirty, cock-loving secret!”

When he’s out of sight, Ray turns the shower back on for a second to rinse the last of the blood out of his mouth, gargling into the spray. 

Looking around, taking in all the civilian niceties of Brad’s freakishly clean bathroom, Ray has a moment of vertigo. Weeks of unerring travel, and here he is. The destination. He can’t wait to sleep.

-

Brad installs him on the couch. Ray could wax fucking lyrical about that couch. For one thing, it is not a stone floor, or the back of a truck, or made of dirt and rocks. Ray has slept like it’s going out of style since he arrived, waking up in the night only to take deep breaths and enjoy the weird smell in Brad’s apartment: cleaning products and gym socks. The man is a monster. 

Saturday morning, Brad walks out of the bedroom to go for a run wearing nothing but shorts and a shirt that’s too tight, and Ray wants to whistle at him, just to piss him off, so he does. Brad rolls his eyes. “Didn’t your inbred brain conjure images of your mother for you to have wet dreams about? This display is conduct unbecoming.”

“That only works if you’re an officer,” Ray informs him. 

Brad shakes his head, not deigning to reply. Ray follows his dreams, watching Brad’s ass run out the door, along with the rest of him. Ray catcalls him out.

It’s not really fun to go back to sleep, and jerking off seems like it would be more entertaining if Brad were still in the apartment, so Ray chooses to raid the kitchen. Brad only has one kind of cereal, because he’s a robot. Ray pours himself a bowl of bran flakes, takes a mouthful, and decides that it can only be improved by sugar, and fuck whatever the dentists say. It’s not like he can’t grow new teeth. Ha. Like a shark. The pain of it seems distant, surrounded by the hilarious whiteness of Brad’s house, cream carpets and pale grey countertops and eggshell cabinets. 

There has got to be a stereo somewhere. 

By the time Brad gets back, red and sweating but not particularly winded, the viking bastard, Ray is singing along to one of his anachronistic CDs. Brad pours himself a glass of water with Pat Benetar informing them all that love is a battlefield, Ray agreeing in harmony. 

Brad grins into his glass, where he thinks Ray can’t see it.

“He’s a marshmallow,” Ray tells the stereo. 

“Do the dishes,” Brad says, straight-faced. 

“Both of us knowing!” Ray yells at his back. Fuck, it feels good to scream because he wants to.

Brad declines his turn, disappearing into the bathroom. Ray eats another bowl of cereal and leaves it in the sink with the other one and Brad’s coffee mug. The CD cycles through some more painfully gay 80s classics. When Brad finally emerges from the bathroom wearing more or less the same thing minus the appealing sweatiness, Ray is sprawled on the kitchen island eating peanut butter out of the jar with a finger, singing at the ceiling fan. “Straight up now tell me do you really wanna love me—” 

“The next time you open your mouth I might cut your tongue out, just to get three minutes’ peace.”

Ray slides off the island, putting it between him and Brad, noise of the stereo suddenly very distant. “Sixteen.”

“What?”

“Sixteen minutes. That’s what it’d get you. It’s simple muscle, right? So the way I figure it, the more complicated a part is the longer it takes to grow back. Fingers take longer than a spleen or whatever. But you’d get about sixteen minutes out of a tongue.” The chill he feels probably isn’t real. There’s no reason to be shivering. “So it’s just about whether you want sixteen minutes of guaranteed silence and a lot of blood in the sink.”

Brad takes a step towards him. Ray probably shouldn’t step back, but hey, whatever. He does what he wants now. 

“Ray…” 

Ray swallows. “Bar?”

“It’s eleven-thirty on a Saturday.”

Ray stares at where he thinks a camera might be if someone were filming them. 

The stereo clicks off, and then Brad waves a hand in front of his face. Jesus. Too close. When did he move. “Ray?”

Ray raises both eyebrows at him, sticking his hands in his pockets. He’s got a knife in there. “Bar?”

Brad sighs and grabs his keys off the side table. 

Ray talks the whole ride over, just because Brad’s silence isn’t anything he particularly wants to listen to. Brad doesn’t protest, but he does turn on the radio, some weird oldies station that plays Air Supply. Brad probably runs it. 

Turns out it’s really hard to find a bar in Southern California that is open at eleven-thirty on a Saturday, so where they end up looks like a cross between a brothel and a flophouse, neon beer sign missing so many letters the only one that still lights up is the R. 

“Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K,” Ray mutters, anticipating the sticky floors and shitty drinks with something approaching glee. 

Brad snorts, looking across the steering wheel at him. “Most triumphant.”

Suddenly, Ray feels a little better. He decides not to dwell on it, choosing instead to slam the door of Brad’s truck open and make a beeline for the bar. A guy on the stoop stares at him, blinking blearily into the sun. He looks fucked up. The place is perfect. 

The smell is a combination of soggy peanuts and old carpet, overlaid with a tangible fug of cheap beer and the faint tang of vomit. Ray loves the bar immediately and with all of his heart. 

Brad wrinkles his nose. 

“Buy me a drink,” Ray demands, feeling himself start to grin. God, what he would have given to be back in a shitty bar when he was in Afghanistan. What he wouldn’t have sold for it. An arm and a leg. “Go on, be a gentleman, I know you’re gagging to be chivalrous.”

“Blow me,” Brad says, all lazy drawl. Still, he goes, ordering two shots of vodka, two beers, enough to get started. He probably won’t get drunk, but that doesn’t mean Ray can’t, and Ray says as much. The bartender glares at him through a fall of brassy red hair. Ray’s smitten. He blows her a kiss.

There are three guys by the grimed-over window staring at them. Ray chooses to be the better man and ignore them, finding himself a corner table, back to the wall. The booth is vinyl, sticky already, the shirt he’s stolen from Brad dragging against it. Ray downs both shots as soon as Brad wedges himself in next to him, leaving him one of the beers as Ray starts in on the other. 

Brad doesn’t say a word about it, just lets his knee knock Ray’s under the table. Ray knocks him right back, and it’s fine. The alcohol begins to work its magic, and if there’s one thing left to be glad about for being a fucking mutant it’s his virgin liver, devoid of all tolerances and build-ups. Ray’s never been so happy to be a cheap date. 

Brad sips his midday beer in silence, glancing around the room. 

“Turns out all you had to do to get me to shut up is ply me with the devil’s spirits,” Ray observes. “My grandma would be proud.”

“That would be reassuring if your grandmother wasn’t some toothless farmer’s prize sheep.”

Ray leans into him, close enough to see the twitch of his lips as Brad tries desperately to keep a straight face. “I’ll have you know Grandpa Bill had all his teeth until the day he died.” 

Brad downs the rest of his beer, staring anywhere but at Ray. Ray decides more alcohol is the order of the day, enjoying the acid burn of it hitting his bloodstream. He steals Brad’s wallet out of his pocket and heads for the bar. He’s got both elbows on the wood when one of the guys by the window — the one with the longest beard, which probably makes him their head wizard — makes his way over and leans right in next to him. “Hey.”

Ray smiles at him. “I’m going to tell you right now I charge by the hour. Cash only, you wouldn't believe how the credit company tries to screw the working man.”

The bartender looks between them and goes back to polishing a glass. Jesus. Ray would take her to task for being a cliché, but then again, he’s the one thinking it, he doesn’t know this chick’s life. Maybe she gets a kick out of polishing glasses. 

A meaty hand lands on Ray’s shoulder. “You a faggot?”

Ray’s got the empty beer glass just there. It’s practically begging him to smash it. Who is he to resist its siren call? So what if most of it goes in his palm, the important part is the biggest shard pokes right up into Grand Bar Wizard’s femoral artery, just pricking the skin. So what if Ray has to hold his dick out of the way? He can wash his hands later. “Say that again? I’m not sure I understood you the first time.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Ray sees the other guys heaving their beer-swollen carcasses towards them. 

The best he gets out of Grand Wizard is a strangled groan, which is really no help at all. “This is California,” Ray informs him. “The correct term is ‘none of your fucking business.’” 

Ray shoves him bodily at his friends. It’s way harder than he thought it would be. His shoulders protest, but the joy of seeing three guys in shitty leather vests go down like bowling pins is worth the muscle tear. He’s stopped bleeding, mostly, by the time they clamber up, but they’re all so _slow._ It’s barely even a fight. The smallest one — still taller than Ray but then, a lot of people are — takes a swing at him. Ray ducks under his arm, laughing, and jabs him in the throat. He staggers back, choking. Serves him right. 

Grand Wizard makes it back to his feet just in time for Ray to break the third one’s wrist. His vest says something ridiculous like Ride Hard, and if Ray weren’t already laughing he would be now because wow. That’s fucking gay. 

Sometimes it’s hard to tell what he’s saying out loud, but if the look on Grand Wizard’s face is anything to go by, whatever’s coming out of Ray’s mouth is nothing he wants to hear. 

“Try it,” Ray tells him. “Come on, what’re you waiting for, an engraved invitation? Skywriting? Help me out here.”

Ray’s never seen a wizard run before. It’s hilarious. 

The bartender hands him a beer. “You really working?”

Ray necks it and gives the glass back, only slightly smeared with blood. “I’m retired.”

She hands him a napkin. Ray is about to use it to wipe his mouth when he takes a better look at it. It’s a phone number. “Yeah, not to crush your dreams or anything, but you’re kinda barking up the wrong—”

The bartender jerks her head at the bloodstain on the barmat. Ray thinks it improves the place. “That kind of work.”

Ray squints at her, trying to make sure she’s in focus. He frames her — dark eyeliner, aggressive dye-job, a face that says she lost patience somewhere a few years ago and never found it again — fingers making a lopsided rectangle. “What’s the catch?”

The bartender shrugs. “Depends what you think is a catch. Call me if you’re needing cash.”

Ray points at her. “You’re a walking cliché,” he informs her, before he crumples up the napkin and shoves it in his pocket. “Two of your finest swill, if you please.”

When he makes his way back to Brad, the motherfucker hasn’t moved at all, just sitting in the booth with his legs stretched out under the table, watching him. “Some help you are. What if they’d carted me off on the back of their motorcycles? What if they had designs on my virgin body?”

“Ray, your body isn’t even worthy of the word ‘virgin’ exiting your mouth.” Brad smirks. “Seems like you had it under control.”

“Yeah, no thanks to you.” Ray drinks both beers, just as Brad reaches for the second glass. “They might have _cursed_ me.” 

Brad stretches, folding both hands behind his head.

Suddenly, Ray wants to get back in the car, the prospect of enclosed proximity no longer an intermediate itch to be pushed through. The pleasant buzz of alcohol might be the catalyst, or the abandon of a little bit of bloodletting, or something in the middle, kindled by the way Brad is looking at him. 

“You got blood on my shirt,” Brad observes. 

“Don’t expect me to make it up to you,” Ray says. “Take me home, you can forgive me on the way if you can get your boner to go down.”

He doesn’t wait for Brad to laugh; he just feels it, the incremental exhale, the fall of Brad’s chest as he forces the air out silently. Asshole doesn’t even bother trying not to.

Ray’s not really planning on blowing him in the car, but it happens anyway, so hey, maybe it’s fate.

-

Somewhere along the way, everything else in Brad’s life begins a slow grind to lower gear as Ray begins to take up more space in his house. 

It would be easy not to notice it, except that he does: he comes home from work and there are dishes in the sink, and Ray is singing in the shower, or he’s out, but something about his presence lingers. Candy wrappers, the new abundance of junk food in the fridge, the constant disarray of the bathroom. 

Ray’s here, and he seems in no rush to go anywhere else. 

Brad should ask a question, but he has already, and gotten a string of words which sounded like English, but absent context are meaningless. It’s just Ray, talking. He hasn’t actually said much. 

Brad remembers him sliding away, talking about sixteen minutes of silence, and feels a chill in the pit of his stomach. He rolls out of bed and heads straight for the bathroom, where he trips on a towel that’s half the floor away from the laundry basket, and picks up a toothbrush that is definitely not his off the side of the bathtub. 

He uses it. What the hell. Ray won’t care, and Brad finds he doesn’t either; spend a few months getting shot at with somebody and sleeping next to them and being intimately aware of when they shit and when they eat and when they jerk off? What’s a fucking toothbrush. 

There’s movement behind him, and Brad doesn’t even tense up. 

Ray plasters himself against his back, squinting past him at the mirror. He’s not tall enough to look over Brad’s shoulder, so the effect is somewhat lost as Ray glares at him. “Party foul, Brad,” he says, voice gravelly. “That’s just downright petty.” He takes the toothbrush right out of Brad’s mouth and sticks it in his. 

Brad should be disgusted. He isn’t. He spits toothpaste and leaves Ray to it, mind already half at work. They’ve got a new round of specialists in, and there’s some reshuffling among the officers. Nothing unusual, but it’s easier to think about that than it is to think about anything else. There’s a voicemail from his mother on his phone, a text or three from his sister. He should call. 

He gets dressed on autopilot, and as he’s heading out the door he passes Ray singing in the shower, yowling, _how many roooooaaaads—_

“Ray,” Brad yells, stopping, “no fucking country music!”

“It’s folk, you tone-deaf sasquatch!” Ray yells back, switching to Springsteen as Brad leaves the house. 

Brad never has any trouble focusing at work. It’s one of the peculiarities of his job that even the boring, bullshit parts of it demand his full attention, if only because not dotting an i or crossing a t sometimes means his requisitions get bounced and frankly Brad can’t excuse that kind of incompetence. Plus, there’s the usual spate of minor injuries and equipment malfunctions and before he knows it a few guys are going out for a drink and Brad is tagging along. 

He sits in the bar, slowly pulling at his beer, and listens with half an ear as Kocher greets a Staff from another section and pulls him over to the table, and they talk shop for a while — who’s going where, what they think of the new batch of officers — before Brad makes his excuses and goes. 

On the way back, the radio skips between stations before settling on the one Brad has it set to, some signal interruption briefly giving him a flash of banjo music before he mashes the button in reflex annoyance. By the time he gets back he’s forgotten about it, which is helpful, because Ray is fucking naked, lying with his leg up on the side of the couch and his arm falling off the side, head at a cant that initially suggests he’s been drugged unconscious. 

Then he blinks his eyes open and grins, stretching until his belly is pulled taut, fingers brushing the floor. 

Brad could ask any number of questions: why the hell are you naked? Don’t you have anything better to do? There’s the faint possibility that Ray is doing laundry, but that’s too absurd for Brad to contemplate beyond a brief flash of him attempting it then getting bored halfway through, wandering off to raid Brad’s bookshelf again and arrange all the covers by colour instead of author. 

Instead, Brad drops his keys, strips his outer off and lays it over one of the chairs, and shoves Ray the rest of the way off the couch. “Come on,” he says, correctly assuming that Ray will spring to his feet with a yelp of indignation. “Or my good mood will wear off and I’ll think twice about letting you bring the stench of whatever carcass you’ve been rolling in into my bedroom.”

“Brad, you say the sweetest things,” Ray mutters, reaching around to unbuckle his belt before brushing past him, skin of his back taking on a mottled quality in the fading light from the window as he passes beneath it.

Brad curses, pulls it the rest of the way off and grabs Ray by the back of the neck. 

Ray freezes, skin and muscle taut under his hand, before he laughs, a faint, unsettling sound that forces all the hair on Brad’s arm to prickle up. Ray twists and then he’s suddenly an arm’s length away, sprawled over Brad’s made bed, glaring like it has wronged him. 

“This type-A thing is really OCD of you, you know,” he says, dragging the covers down. “It’s like a sad little robot lives here.” 

“A sad little robot who’s about to fuck you senseless unless you somehow convince me otherwise,” Brad drawls, stripping out of his clothes, laying them on the wardrobe so he can deal with them later. He’s already starting to get that full-body shiver Ray seems designed to provoke, the hook under his navel digging in, dragging him closer to the bed as his skin heats up. 

Ray grins, manic edge to his eyes probably a trick of the light. He mimes talking with his left hand, right hand idly drifting towards his dick like he doesn’t think Brad can fucking see. “Bitch, bitch, bitch.”

Brad grabs him by the ankle and yanks, dragging Ray to the edge of the bed. “Hands off,” he mutters, before he goes to his knees. He’s still wearing his underwear, and maybe one sock, but at this point he’s too ready to care, the sight of Ray easy and naked on his bed just a little too much to deal with after a long day. 

He digs his hands into Ray’s hips to steady him before he opens his mouth and swallows as much of Ray’s dick as he can. He clamps down harder when Ray starts to laugh, hips jerking in protest as Brad holds him still. The muscles of his stomach curl and then Ray’s got both hands spread over the back of Brad’s skull, pressing forcefully down. 

The momentary panic gives way as Brad starts to lose air, everything going soft-edged and hazy, sensation reduced to skin and muscle and heat.

Brad could pull off, even with Ray’s new lack of self-preservation lending him a shocking amount of strength, but he doesn’t want to, clawing bruises into Ray’s flanks as he starts seeing stars behind his eyes, jaw aching with the strain. 

Ray is muttering a stream of invective, leaning on the back of Brad’s head, all of him heat and sweat and the rasp of coarse hair, until the sound bleeds out of Brad’s ears and bitterness fills his mouth. 

He swallows by reflex and twists out of Ray’s hold, catching his breath with his face half pressed into the mattress, so hard he thinks trying to climb onto the bed might pull him over the egde. The shape of Ray’s palms feels imprinted on the bones of his skull, until one of Ray’s wandering knuckles taps him on the chin, and Brad blinks away the oxygen deprivation fugue to see Ray already going for the lube. “I know you’re not finished,” he’s saying, looking critical. “Come on, don’t tell me you haven’t been thinking about this all day, you repressed piece of shit.”

Brad’s just irritated enough to make the effort, standing, yanking off his underwear, and yes, one fucking sock, before taking Ray by the wrist and flipping him over. “If you insist,” he manages, liberating the lube from Ray’s other hand. From there it devolves, Ray half laughing, half cursing as Brad finally manages to keep him still enough to slide in, surrounded on all sides by noise: his blood in his ears, the murmur of Ray’s voice, the pound of his heart where Brad’s got a hand on his neck, thumb set up under the curve of his jaw, pressing into the artery. He comes so quickly he thinks it might be a mistake somehow, body rigid with the almost-painful shock of it. 

Ray shoves him off, rolling him over with an elbow to the chest. 

Brad kicks him out of the bed, literally. Ray slides across the sheets and lands with a thump.

“Fine, I can take a hint,” he says, hand over his heart, where some of the ink that Brad remembers still lingers. “God forbid anything force you to sleep in any position other than proper attention. Someone might think you’re human.”

“Go to sleep,” Brad mutters, fucked-out and sated. 

Ray salutes, then gives him the finger on the way out. 

Brad goes to sleep sweaty and covered in lube, the wet spot on the bed cold and disgusting by the time he wakes up, but even as he sacrifices his run in favour of changing the sheets, he’s already wondering what he’ll find as he heads out the door. 

Luckily, Ray is still asleep, snoring with his mouth open, so Brad leaves him be.

-

Time is a malleable, stretchy thing. There’s coffee waiting in the kitchen one morning as the spring warmth bleeds into May. It’s still hot, just for Ray. Or not. It might not really be waiting for him, but the truth is that Ray is not morally opposed to stealing Brad’s sloppy seconds, and he wouldn’t have to devolve into theft and ethical bankruptcy if Brad were less quiet in the ungodly morning hours, sneaking past Ray’s couch — and he might not have scent-marked it yet, but it’s his — on his way to the kitchen and out the door.

Ray finishes off the coffee, raids Brad’s bedroom for something clean to wear, pops on sunglasses that look like maybe Brad’s mom left them around the last time she came to supervise her deeply unhinged progeny, and heads outside.

It’s a beautiful morning. A gentle wind raises the hair across Ray’s bare forearms. Despite how futile it would be, he wants to fire off a couple of rounds into the pristine blue of the sky, just to be contrary. As it is, he spots Brad in the driveway, elbows-deep in the innards of his Chevy. That truck has seen better days, but who is Ray to question a man’s emotional attachment to a pile of junk that represents deep-seated anxiety about the size of his cock?

Besides, it’s a singular sight to witness the Iceman with grease and motor oil down his shirt, outside of active combat. Ray dog-whistles to get his attention.

Brad dives out from beneath the hood of the car, and gives him a flat look devoid of feeling. “You look like a retarded twelve-year-old when you wear my clothes.”

“It’s the full boyfriend experience, motherfucker.”

“Ray, that’s disgusting, even for you.” He turns back to pretend he knows what he’s doing with the car, a clear dismissal.

“Don’t give me that, homes.” Ray wags an admonishing finger at Brad’s back, not particularly bothered that his gesture goes unnoticed and unappreciated. “A lonely social reject like yourself? You’re probably getting hard just looking at me all up in your shit. It’s fucking sweet. Hey, you can blow me later, get all those girly feelings off your chest.”

Brad makes a noise as though he’s retching into the engine, and Ray can only cackle. He climbs on top of the Chevy and sprawls there, soaking up the sun, all four limbs dangling over the edge, weightless. The hood is already warm, metal and paint giving back a concentrated stale heat. California heat is different to Afghanistan heat, which in turn was different to Iraq heat. It’s just air, Ray thinks: same fucking sun. And yet. The smallest things make all the difference.

He rolls up the sleeves of Brad’s shirt to spare himself embarrassing tan lines. He hasn’t had a chance to find out if he can get a normal person tan instead of sunburn. The thought of spending an eternity with a pasty white ass is too depressing to ponder; he rearranges himself on the hood, turns his face to get a better angle, until bright fireworks start to go off across the insides of his eyelids.

He doesn’t pay attention to Brad. He’s sure Brad is studiously trying to ignore him, too. It takes far too long for Ray to actually listen past the strange acoustics of Brad humming something under his breath and the sound bouncing around the Chevy’s guts, “—only boy who could ever teach me,” pathetically toneless and deadpan, “he was, he was, lord knows he was—”

Ray starts shaking in silent laughter, the hood digging into his shoulder blades when he lifts his head to keep from choking on his own tongue. “Dude,” he manages around the hysteria threatening to crawl out of his throat on the tail end of humour, “every time I think you’ve out-fucking-gayed yourself. Every time. And I count all the depraved homosexual acts you’ve enacted upon my body.”

“It’s a classic, Ray.”

“Yeah, well, so is George Michael, doesn’t make you any less of a fag.” In any other mood, Ray would wonder that outside of a context where they can bond over a shared hatred of bullshit orders, their conversations seem to revolve around cock, these days. Operant conditioning, maybe. Pavlovian response; fucking Russians. “Actually, probably makes you more of one, in my opinion. Since you ask.”

Brad, perhaps to honour the fact of having had Ray’s dick in his hands less than twelve hours prior, refuses to comment. He’s quiet for all of three and a half minutes, a distinct silence that has a presence of its own, as he tinkers with something that gives tiny but ominous creaks. Like bones. Ray raises one hand to block out the sun, waggles his fingers. Plenty of bones in a hand.

He hears Brad unearth himself from under the hood, hears the scuff of running shoes across concrete; he feels the air shifting on his right side, as accommodating as Ray never plans on being. He lets his hand drop on top of his chest and turns his head. The back of his neck is sweaty, but not as sweaty as Brad looks, dampness at his temples and the collar of his t-shirt. He wipes his hands on what was Ray’s own shirt, when he’d first showed up. How the time flies.

“You know,” says Brad, impassive and washed out in the bright light, “the only reason I’m not beating you unconscious right now is your newfound ability to stand severe oxygen deprivation without getting more brain-damaged than you already are.”

“That’s a lot of big, overeducated pussy words to thank me for the amazing fucking head. Did it make you feel like a virgin, Bradley? Touched for the very first time? Because you’re welcome.” Ray tries to pet him, like a cat. Brad dodges before he can get any of Ray’s fingers shoved in his eyes, and Ray ends up mashing his hand against the side of his face, sweaty and sticky and too warm. “Don’t worry. You’re not bad yourself.”

“And I’m sure our dive instructors would be thrilled to know where all that training ended up.”

Ray shrugs, a flat drag of bone and tendon over the hood of the car. “Not a lot of diving opportunities in desert countries, am I right?”

“Sound logic,” Brad decides, and gives him a grin that could pin and mount a butterfly with its sharp edges. Even mediated through his sunglasses and the empty air between them, Ray wants to carve that expression into his own skin and let it live there.

“Although, technically speaking, you always pussy out before the getting gets good.” Ray shrugs again, just as expansively, at Brad’s inquiring hum. “Diving, breath control, all that shit. Look, just—” He tries again, reaching out lazy and uncoordinated. Brad catches his hand before it can connect, but lets Ray place the flat of his palm over his mouth, the hollow between Ray’s thumb and forefinger pressed right under his nose. Brad exhales low and warm over his skin. “You gotta let go a little.”

It’s too bright to be sure, but Ray imagines he can see the pupil dilation that could be fight or flight instinct starting to kick in. He says, “No, for real, you should try it. Dislodge that long, hard stick up your ass so there’s more space for another.”

Two ways it could go, but Ray only expects the one where he ends up flat on his back in the dirt with a knee to the throat and another to the kidney.

Brad leans into his hand, putting real weight behind it, and bites the meat of Ray’s palm hard enough to puncture skin and draw blood. A part of Ray wants to roll over and beg, but instead he tightens his grip. His fingers dig into Brad’s cheekbones.

“You filthy fucking animal,” he says, sweet and mocking. “In front of the neighbours?”

They barely make it inside: Ray drags Brad by the throat, an inexorable pull, kicks the door shut and wheezes out a wild giggle as Brad slams him bodily down, down, down. Zero to fired up and ready to go, and all it takes is one push in the right direction: it’s all Ray needs to get his hand on that bloody and bloodthirsty hunger, so generously distributed between them in bruises and marks and binding scars, fucked up flesh in every way.

Brad’s pulse is quickfire and pounding, fragile against the pads of Ray’s fingers, but he lets Ray keep his hands there, lets Ray kick him in the side, knee to the spleen, hard and vicious to make his point. He lets Ray turn him and arrange him until his back is pulled flush against Ray’s chest, larger body strangely pliant with the most concrete point of contact between them the press of Ray’s palm on Brad’s larynx. He feels all of Brad’s body against his, but he feels none of it with as much promise of immediate damage.

“Fuck,” is all Brad says, barely vocalising: Ray feels the shape of the word more in shifting tendons. He shoves his heel into the weld of Brad’s thigh and crotch, to discourage protests, but even on the verge of throwing him off in trained self-preservation Brad is already hard in his pants. Contrary, in a spike of instinctive panic, he tries to twist out of Ray’s grip. The floor is a nightmare on Ray’s back as he skids across it, rucks up the carpet, finds purchase by winding one leg around Brad’s thigh and planting the other foot as leverage, muscles screaming at the stretch.

“Like a fucking eel,” he says to the overheated, sweaty skin of Brad’s neck, harsher that he meant. His blood pounds in a rising quake, an echo of Brad’s own, sliding into a matching drumbeat.

Whoever spotted Brad’s shot, the shot that took Ray out, must have breathed with him, too. With a livid noise, Ray tightens his grip on Brad’s throat and undoes his jeans with his free hand, forearm flat across Brad’s abdomen. Brad nearly takes his eye out, reaching back with scrambling hands to get a grip on Ray, to maybe stop him.

Ray doesn’t want to stop. He wants, in no real order: to bruise Brad more than he is already bruised, to leave marks blooming purple-blue-yellow, like pollution over abused skin, undisguisable and unmistakeable. He wraps his hand around Brad’s dick too tightly to be comfortable, sweat not nearly enough to ease the way. Brad’s adam’s apple works as he tries and fails to do a goddamn thing, lack of oxygen impairing thought and instinct alike. Ray wants him to go into work on Monday and say, _It’s nothing, sir, I fell down some stairs._ He wants the reality of it, and for the sweat and blood to last. He wants the fucking damage.

Brad thumps one open palm on the floor in a universal gesture of surrender, of _no_. Ray drags his nails down the underside of Brad’s cock, and Brad stops.

Mouth to Brad’s ear, neck, itching as it catches on his hair, Ray gasps out obscenities right up until the moment Brad throws his head back, half on instinct and half not, knocks the back of his skull straight into Ray’s nose. The cartilage shifts with a low, slick crunch and Ray feels blood oozing down his upper lip.

“Motherfucker,” he snarls, twists his hand ruthlessly on each upstroke at the same time he digs his fingers into the sides of Brad’s windpipe, fingernails scraping clammy skin. All the noises Brad has been making, those thrilled and those angry, die down as his body jerks, once, twice, something frighteningly robotic about it, like he isn’t all there. He comes all over the hem of his shirt and Ray’s fingers.

Ray could let his own orgasm build just watching it happen, Brad on top of him but helpless, drifting into choked out unconsciousness. Fucking on the floor at ten in the morning with blood in his mouth. He doesn’t want to let go, with a minute or two still left to spare before asphyxia would be dangerous. He presses his bloody lips to the side of Brad’s neck.

The hard jab to the head comes out of the left field, Ray’s situational awareness shot to shit. He sees stars. He moves back, loosening his grip on Brad’s neck, and everything happens like a one-two beat in stopmotion: the sudden burst of pain in his shoulder as it’s wrenched out of the socket, the strangled howl he lets slip past clenched teeth, the touch on his chin and the opposite temple, the mindless struggle when he realises what’s about to happen.

He still hears the hideous crack of his neck snapping, and then everything goes dark.

When he comes to again, not especially surprised, it’s without a bang or whimper. He opens his eyes, blinking at the white ceiling of Brad’s hallway, light filtering in through the glass in the door at an angle that is about the same as when Ray died. Was killed. Without the rush of blood and adrenaline in his ears, his dick depressingly soft in the aftermath of resurrection, Ray is willing to admit he probably had that one coming.

He tips his head back, then to the sides, testing the stretch and new alignment of his spine. Some of the vertebrae crack, but he can move his fingers and toes. No lasting paralysis, then. Sitting up, he finds purchase against the door and rolls his shoulder. It aches, the joint twisted up in all kinds of wrong directions, but it isn’t dislocated.

Brad is staring at him from the opposite end of the hallway, a mirror of Ray’s own position: knees pulled up to his chest, feet wide apart, back to the wall. His eyes are wide, combat shock wide, mortars-flying-next-to-his-head wide. The bruise running the width of his neck looks a little gruesome, a little nasty, and a lot obvious. Even with several feet of distance between them Ray can see the distinct fingerprint shapes dotting the sides of his trachea. They look inked.

“What the shit,” says Ray, rubbing one hand over his aching arm, “you reset my shoulder? Dude, I’m touched.”

“Yeah, in the fucking head.” Brad’s voice is barely a croak. Ray wants to lick his neck and feel the vibration when he speaks. “Don’t,” he adds, an aborted exhalation of what could be anger, or fear, any of the sticky messy human shit Brad Colbert has always tried to wash his hands of. “Don’t do that again, Ray.”

Ray would see it if he shut his eyes, played across his eyelids in vivid technicolour: Brad’s instincts going into overdrive at the precise second a normal person would stop fighting, trained predator going for the jugular in the face of a threat. Get the upper hand and maximise damage to the most vital, vulnerable part of the body. Ray would have done the same, before the project and the Arctic facility and Macon and Baker got their hands on him.

He considers Brad’s order and waves his hand, breezy and unconcerned. “Don’t sweat it, I got better.” He grins, too wide, with blood still on his teeth. “I’ll always get better. Unto the great wide eternity and beyond.”

“You might, but I didn’t go into a shady white government van because a nice man gave me fucking candy and touched me in my special place. I won’t get better from manual goddamn strangulation.”

“I wouldn’t let you actually die,” Ray says, holding a hand up to his chest in wide-eyed offence. “And it wasn’t a government van, homes, how stupid do you think I am? Don’t answer that.”

Brad cracks a small, lopsided grin. It slides off his face quickly, but the tension in his shoulders eases by a margin. Ray wonders how to ask him whether he’d be open to getting choked unconscious again sometime. He feels the lingering phantom of Brad’s pulse on his fingertips and rubs his hands together to dispel it.

“You are likely the most screwed up donkey-fucking, buck-toothed, redneck waste of air I’ve met in my life, but try as you might, Ray, I don’t think you’re stupid at all,” Brad drawls as he gets up, a casual predator stroll across the hallway. The contusions on his throat are livid, skin around the damage a pallid white. They wouldn’t look out of place on a corpse.

Ray itches with suspicion. “Fuck you. I don’t try, it’s a natural gift.”

Brad straddles his legs, slotting his body into the space between Ray’s knees and chest. Ray reaches out to touch his neck and fit the outline of his own palm there. Brad slaps his hand away, snorting at Ray’s scowl. He cradles Ray’s head, a touch so off-key tender it makes Ray want to spray disinfectant on them both. He tries to twist out of Brad’s grip.

“Like a fucking eel,” Brad parrots. For a moment, Ray thinks Brad will kiss him: that softness at the corners of his eyes is familiar, by now, and welcome any time Ray remembers to compare it to the glint of a rifle scope. He steels himself for it.

Brad resets his broken nose. The cartilage slots back in place with an even meatier crunch than the first time, the sound wet with blood that’s already oozed down Ray’s face. He moans around the ache of it, tongue darting out to taste fresh blood, and that’s when Brad does kiss him. He aims badly, misses the mark by a mile, and presses his open mouth to Ray’s jaw. The next attempt is more successful, but still sloppy and uneven. When he pulls back, he has to wipe Ray’s blood off his own face.

“Okay?” he asks.

There are a lot of things Ray could tell him, all of them true, but Ray settles for the one deeply subjective white lie he thinks matters, here and now: “Yeah. Yeah, fine.”

“I’ll get you some water. Come on.”

Brad climbs off him, taking all of his body heat with him, and doesn’t hesitate — doesn’t visibly hesitate — before giving Ray his unprotected back.

“I might be a screwup,” Ray yells after him, pushing himself up, “but it takes one to know one, and you’re one sick fucking puppy!”

“I don’t fuck dogs, Ray, stop projecting your own depravity.”

“That’s not — Jesus christ. Go learn some grammar, you fuck.” Ray shakes his head, despairing. The honeymoon glaze will inevitably wear off in time, but for now, he follows Brad into the kitchen.


	3. Chapter 3

**October, 2004**

Ray’s first last words are “Mother _fuck_ —” which is pretty fitting, all things considered. 

There is absolutely nothing good about twenty thousand volts, except for how the snow suddenly seems technicolour, as though the light is filtering through thousands of tiny shards of glass. It’s the best acid trip in the world for the fraction of time before the pain hits, and then he is blind, convulsing, shocked breathless. Dead. If he has a final thought it’s lost, nerves overfired, grey matter lit up like a firework. 

When he wakes up, he’s expecting bullets. Maybe memory is a fucking sadist. 

Two weeks before he dies, Ray comes out of a drugged fugue in a coffin. 

The panic hits about a minute after he realises he’s not dreaming, heart pounding in his throat. There’s no room to move. Screaming makes it worse, the sound bouncing back until Ray can hardly tell if he’s making it or if it’s just trapped, reverberating until it comes alive, a long note of terror filling every empty space. 

It might be minutes or it might be hours or Ray might have scratched his fingers down to sinew by the time it hisses open. The light is blinding. Ray thinks it might be the best thing he’s ever seen, too panicked even to blink. 

“Look at that.”

Someone grabs his wrist. He doesn’t jerk away, pulling air into his lungs with the abandon of the recently drowned. 

“What does the file say?”

“Regenerative mutation, class A.”

“That’s disgusting.” Whoever is holding his wrist drops it. 

Ray doesn’t think he’s shaking, but as the light clears, he becomes aware of it along with a rush of stimuli. He is shaking. There is a vast, grey ceiling above him, the echo of distant steps, the chatter of his teeth in the cold. It’s a hangar. He’s so happy he could cry, even if whatever is happening to his fingers hurts more by the second. 

He ignores the faces peering down at him, raising a trembling hand. A fingernail erupts from the ruined bed, spraying a fine mist of blood. Ray starts to laugh, hardly hearing it, high whine building in his ears. It’s real. Fuck. 

Somebody slaps him. “Shut up.”

Focus. Focus, come on. Ray blinks away the stars, tasting blood in his mouth. Breathe. There’s air, so fucking breathe it. The starburst clears, and Ray has his breathing down to deep lungfuls instead of panicked gasps, chest loosening by the second. 

Two men are looking down at him. They’re in fatigues, no insignia, no camo, plain black tac, guns holstered at the thigh. If he lunged for one right now he might even be able to grab him, but there’s a third standing further back, sidearm trained squarely at Ray.

“If you’ve got half a fucking brain cell you know you’re more likely to shoot them than me, right?”

Gun Guy frowns, glancing at the man Ray presumes is in charge. “Usually they know to keep their mouths shut.”

The face on the left is older, sort of middle-aged, craggy and pale. “Sometimes they malfunction.” He has an incongruously high voice. “You’ll do better if you obey the rules,” he tells Ray, lifting what looks like a tablet and tapping something into it with short, crooked fingers. 

The second guy, the one on the right, is just looking down at him, a total lack of concern evident in every line of his body. Ray closes his eyes, just for a moment, just to get a feeling. His hands don’t really hurt anymore, ache faded by adrenaline. There’s just enough room to move a few inches to the side, the lid of the fucking coffin only half down, the whole thing tilted at a slight angle. There’s something around his neck that is digging into his spine. His arms are free. 

Ray lunges for the gun. It’s a hail Mary, but he has nothing to lose. 

The taser doesn’t knock him out, but he’s paralysed enough that he ends up with his hands cuffed behind his back, a second set on his ankles. On its own, that would be enough. He doesn’t see the bag coming, face down on the ground, so it’s a merciful surprise. If he’d seen it coming he might have begged. 

It only takes a minute for his limbs to start obeying him again, but that’s as long as it takes for him to be lifted under the arms, and no amount of kicking and screaming is going to do anything. If he goes quietly it might be easier, but there’s a part of him that just plain doesn’t want to, SERE training be damned. 

They move him as a triad without bothering to drug him a second time. It’s possible to identify turns, left, a long straight corridor, but all the sound is muffled, even the rasp of his breath in his throat. It feels like hours before the bag is pulled off. The room is about eight by eight, windowless, containing a mattress and a toilet and nothing else that Ray can see with one cheek mashed to the floor, a boot right between his shoulder blades keeping him there. 

The older man crouches down so Ray can see him, tilting his head to make eye contact. “I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself. I’m Doctor Macon. Here is how this is going to go: you will do what I say, when I say it, and this doesn’t have to be a trial.”

Ray doesn’t answer. It’s a lie. If he’s learned one thing since signing on the dotted line, it’s that this is all a fucking lie, and he’d known it, even as he was putting pen to paper. 

He’d done it anyway, because what the fuck else was he going to do? 

“Yeah? Uncuff me, then.” 

“No, I don’t think so.” Macon stands up, until all Ray can see are his boots. Thick, designed for the cold. “See you in the morning, and we’ll try this again.”

Ray struggles as soon as the boot lifts off his back, two sets of feet tramping out of the room before he can get a better look at them. The best he gets is a view of their backs and then the door slams shut with an automatic finality. Even if Ray could reach for a handle there isn’t one. “What is this?” he yells. “A horror movie?”

His voice doesn’t echo this time, even the walls refusing to parrot his words back. 

Getting comfortable is a lost cause, but a part of him is thankful it isn’t the coffin again. Maybe the drug was supposed to last until now. Maybe the drug was supposed to keep him happy for the whole of the transport and it just wore off too fast, Ray’s new metabolism chewing through it like a tic tac instead of a syringe full of quaaludes. Maybe the people at the other end didn’t give a fuck if he woke up in a box halfway around the world with the other half to go. It’s the option that seems likelier. 

Wherever the fuck he is, it’s cold. Far from Nowhere, Texas, or Come-Here-To-Die, Arizona, or wherever he’d been before. Ray got on a plane, like he didn’t know any better, and ended up —

If he’d known activating the gene would take what it took, he’d have gone back to that cereal aisle in that Wal-Mart in California and forced himself to buy a whole shelf of the stuff. 

He barely remembers the day it happened, except for the moment he ripped a hand out of the restraint, ligaments snapping, so agonising that he’d almost regretted it, and then: a flush through his body, all the way up his spine, heat just beyond unbearable. He remembers vomiting, drugs leaving his body through a sweat he’d never felt anything like, except for the moment the first bullet skipped right at him in Iraq. He remembers every machine going berserk and his half-ruined hand repairing itself like a time lapse, agony all over, right down to the base of his teeth. He remembers _congratulations, Person,_ and being strapped right back down. 

Maybe that would work now, just pulling until something in his wrists snaps enough to get the cuffs off. 

Ray thinks about it until the thinking about it hurts. It wouldn’t hurt less than just leaving them. In the middle of a debate with himself, he falls into a fitful sleep.

He wakes up to nothing. His left arm is asleep, his head hurts and one of the ankle cuffs is too tight. He’s fairly certain if they leave it on too much longer it’ll do damage, but even as he thinks it, he catches himself starting to laugh. It’ll heal. It’ll all heal. The door clangs open. 

Ray has turned himself to face it, so he gets his first view of Macon, then the hall behind. He’s not alone, but it’s not the same set of faces as yesterday. This time the second set of boots belongs to a man of a similar age, but with a face like someone took a shovel to it at some point, narrow and long, creased in the cheeks. If Ray wasn’t already freezing cold he’d have a chill. It’s just something about him, nothing Ray could put a finger on, even if he had the use of his hands.

He makes the mistake of taking his eyes off Macon. 

The moment before Ray chokes, he feels Macon’s gnarled fingers on the back of his neck, sliding under the collar. The thing he’s almost forgotten about, heavy and metallic across the front of his throat. Macon pulls it tight, fingers too hot against Ray’s skin.

“You’ll notice you’ve been fitted with this,” Macon says, tone as conversational as it was yesterday, or however many hours ago Ray managed to fall asleep. “It’s very clever, actually. A nice closed circuit that I can trigger at any time, but I really don’t want to have to use it, are we understood?”

Ray’s a little busy choking to reply, which Macon must take as assent. He lets go, and Ray coughs, trying to eradicate the feeling of slick metal crushing his trachea. It’s gonna bruise, but then, it might not, it might just pop back, like a hyoid-shaped jack in the box. Ray doesn’t have the breath to ask what’ll happen if Macon does use it. Ray’s been tased in the last few hours, and if the damage isn’t lasting, whatever the collar does is probably worse. 

“Let’s get started. Mr. Baker, if you would?”

Ray wants nothing less in the world than for ‘Mr. Baker’ to touch him, but there’s not a whole lot he can do about it. All he does, in the end, is take the cuffs off Ray’s ankles and haul him upright. Ray can’t feel one of his feet, but as he stands the feeling comes back in a tingling rush. “Fuck.”

Neither Macon nor Baker respond, simply prodding Ray out the door and down the hall. The row of identical doors are numbered, but there’s no way to tell what’s behind them. Ray wants to know, wants to have a number to cling to, an indication of what he fell into and what he’s in it with. It shouldn’t feel good to walk, but it does. The air is very clean, some kind of filtration, maybe, but Ray can almost taste it after the foetid darkness of the coffin. Box. A coffin is for dead people. It was a transport box. Like for a doll. 

The room they stop in has even brighter lights than the cell, but more importantly, in Ray’s opinion, it contains something that looks a lot like a dentist’s chair, if it was lifted directly out of a nightmare. It has straps. 

Baker strips the cuffs off Ray’s wrists. His shoulders protest, then after a prickle of healing they stop. Maybe that will get less weird. 

“Take a seat, Mr. Person.” Macon stands beside the chair, looking at him expectantly, both eyebrows raised in genial patience.

“No thanks.”

Macon sighs. “Mr. Baker?”

Baker forces him at gunpoint. At least it wasn’t willing, Ray tells himself, staring up at the light, then past it. There’s a tripod, a camera with a blinking red light. Ray stares it down, refusing to allow the glass eye to scare him.

Sitting in the chair has a terrible sort of formality. The straps tighten, and Ray is right back in the hot basement in the desert, trying so hard not to die that his body supercharged itself. 

Baker turns away. When he turns back, he is holding a pair of clippers. 

Macon taps Ray’s chin, forcing his attention away from Baker’s hands. “What we do with regeneratives is a little unusual, Mr. Person. You see, we have to find out what exactly it is you can withstand so we can place you where you'll be most needed, so we usually start with a part you can afford to lose. Don’t worry. It will not affect your value.”

“Sure, that’s what I’m worried about,” Ray manages, but it’s barely a croak. 

Baker’s face is thrown into terrible relief by the overheads. He looks sort of like that thing that was on TV when Ray was a kid, the creepy puppet who read ghost stories on cable. Ray wants to tell him so, but without any warning at all, quick as a pre-anaesthetic surgeon, Baker clips off the smallest finger on Ray’s left hand. 

Distantly, Ray is aware that he’s screaming again. His hand is on fire, nerves in overdrive, and then, after what feels like an eternity, his skin begins to crawl. Ray watches with dawning horror as, under the still-gushing blood, bone and sinew begin to push up through the wound. It hurts like nothing he’s ever felt before, as though every part of his arm is being pulled in a different direction, stretched to breaking. The new finger looks exactly like the old one, but slick and pink like skin recently relieved of a scab. Ray’s going to be sick. 

Macon clicks a stopwatch. “Twenty-three minutes,” he says, looking at the camera. “That’s very impressive.”

Baker looks bored, cleaning the clippers with a toothbrush. “What next?”

Ray is about to beg. Fuck his dignity and fuck his choices and fuck his honour. Ray is about to beg no matter what difference it makes, when Macon says: “I think Mr. Person has been very cooperative. We’ll resume tomorrow.” He taps something into a tablet, and shuts off the camera, and that’s that. 

Ray is escorted back to the cell and left there, thankfully unrestrained. It’s the greatest relief of his life, until he spots the bottle of water on the bed. He knows what this is. He knows what operant conditioning is, he knows what they’ll get out of his cooperation, but in that moment he can’t bring himself to care. He drinks it, and falls immediately asleep.

There’s no way to tell how long it takes for Macon and Baker to test him, but in the process, Ray learns this: there is nothing they can do to him that will stick. He loses track of days after the first time they burn him. He passes out, of course, but he wakes up whole. It’s never dark in the cell, but there’s something of a cycle to their visits, and as he learns it, Ray begins to fall back on the only thing he has left: training. If he’d known after boot that he’d come out of the Marines with anything more than panic nightmares about PT and an ability to sleep anywhere, he’d have laughed about it, but Ray’s sort of lost track of what’s funny and what isn’t. 

Maybe it was the eye. It was probably the eye. It had felt a little like a thousand mice were trying to gnaw their way out of his skull through where his optic nerve used to be, which was a sensation he’d have given an eye never to experience. He’d said so at the time. It had felt better to just talk, because so far that’s the only thing they haven’t been able to stop him doing. 

Finally, he starts to count. How many steps here? How many people in the hall? Does Baker keep trophies? Wait, that one doesn’t go there. That one’s for the other plan. How many winter coats has he seen?

It’s easier to play along now that Macon and Baker — and doesn’t that sound like a nightmare eighties smooth jazz cover band — think they have him figured out. Fuck it, Macon even thinks Ray is funny. 

He still films him, but now sometimes he talks back. 

Ray escapes on a Monday. It probably isn’t actually Monday, but he hasn’t seen a calendar in what feels like years, so fuck it, it’s Monday now. The SERE guys would be proud. 

Sometimes, Baker comes for Ray alone. Those are the days when he knows it’s going to be really fun for Baker, so about an inverse amount of fun for Ray. The thing is, while they’ve been testing him, Ray’s been learning as well. It’d be hard not to, when he’s had so many things in so many body parts, and so many weird spaces where things should be and aren’t anymore that there’s only one thing he doesn’t know about himself. 

Baker doesn’t get a chance to fire a shot, because the next time he shows up alone, Ray smashes his head directly into the concrete wall. The sound it makes is a little bit like if a coconut were opened with a hammer. He starts bleeding from the nose, even though Ray grabbed him by the temple and smashed him into it sideways, so he’s probably not getting up anytime soon. 

Good thing, too, because Ray steals his clothes, his boots and his gun. There’s a keycard Ray recognises in an inside pocket, and one he doesn’t. “Jackpot,” he mutters, kneeling in the spreading pool of blood to look at Baker. He’s blinking, so he’s not dead, but he’s probably most of the way there. Ray grabs him by the chin. “You’re welcome, Ray,” he puppets, “sorry I tortured you.”

Ray lets him drop, wipes the blood off his new gloves and makes a break for it. 

Every time Baker and Macon show up, they bring cold air with them. 

There are no signs for the exit, but Ray can follow a breeze with the rest of them. His black clothes don’t show the blood much, and Ray can manage to walk with purpose if he has to.

If he’s expecting sirens, he is sorely disappointed. In a way, it’s kind of an anticlimax, until he finally swipes himself through the coldest door he can find. 

There are other buildings. Huge ones. The hangar on one side, stretching out almost to the point at which Ray’s eyes see curvature, grey and weatherbeaten. The other, low bungalows, stacked almost to the roof with snow. In front of him is thirty miles of white, wind snatching the warmth out of his open mouth. There’s nowhere to go, even if Ray will never be able to lose all his toes and fingers to frostbite. It’s not just cold. It’s desolate. Arctic. 

“Very impressive, Mr. Person.”

Ray turns around. Macon is in the doorway, holding his tablet under an arm and something that looks like the remote for a garage door in his hand. Absurdly, he seems about to park his SUV off the street so hoodlums can’t key the paint job. “Mr. Baker would agree, if he were still with us.”

“Yeah, about that! Where the fuck are we?” Ray hears the edge of hysteria in his voice and decides not to care. He’s outside. He can still make a run for it. 

“It’s not important.” Macon holds the remote in his fingers. “I think you should come inside now.”

In the moment before Ray dies, he considers it. He thinks about going back inside, where it may not be warm, but it isn’t this breath-stealing, bone-cracking kind of cold. He thinks about going back to Macon, who is probably already tabulating what this means for his _value._

Ray makes a run for it. He hears the hum of electricity before he feels it. He starts to speak, and then everything is blinding snow for the suspended instant before the darkness closes over him.

-

**May, 2006**

Brad goes to work in the morning with a bruise like an inkblot spread over his throat. 

On base, he’s a Staff Sergeant, combat meritorious, and if anyone were going to give him shit about it, they’d have to weigh the cost against the benefit of pissing him off. Brad’s got a uniform to fall back on, but even so, there’s no disguising it, so his best bet is just flat out pretending it isn’t there. 

Kocher eyes him once, and Brad stares right back, and that is the end of it. People can generally take the signal up if a Staff isn’t in the mood for a razzing. 

By midday he forgets about it. 

It isn’t until he gets in his car at the end of the afternoon that he sees it again, reflected in his rearview, and suddenly the pain comes seeping back, skin hot and swollen as he swallows. The feeling of it, the sense-memory of Ray, too strong, somehow, despite not being much stronger than he ever was, pulling Brad flush against his chest by the throat, thumb and fingers digging tracks into the meat of his neck, the frantic, breathless arousal, too much, too hard, and then: reflex. 

Brad hasn’t thought about it, except for how it’s all he can think about, the staring eyes, the broken nose, the unmistakable angle of a dislocated shoulder, and all of it eclipsed by the deadness of the body. What does injury matter when it’s a corpse? The crunch Ray’s shoulder had made going back in had been deafening, and Ray hadn’t twitched. Brad had done it just to see whether he would, whether the death was some kind of falsehood, a skewed mutational camouflage for the body to gain time to heal. 

Nothing. He was dead and Brad killed him. 

If it’s guilt, it’s not the kind of guilt Brad is familiar with. Lying to his parents in middle school, saying something regrettable, these are the things that provoked guilt, before. Simple, personal guilt. Brad holds responsibility for actions during wartime, but the guilt under it is complex, institutional, nothing that is fundamentally his alone. When it was through a scope, it was covered under his ROE. Even if the face was familiar. 

It was different, sitting with his back to the hallway wall looking at Ray Person’s corpse, waiting for him to come back to life. Even half an hour later, the instant Ray twitched, blinked, and sat up like a marionette suddenly restored to working order, Brad hadn’t been sure. 

He never asked Ray how he’d known it was Brad, two thousand feet away and dug in, but he’s never denied it, either. Maybe it’s confirmation bias, the same way Brad knows now, with absolute certainty, that Ray isn’t lying about this.

Brad killed him. Twice. Both times, Ray came back to life, something so impossible yet so undeniable now that Brad has to turn past the fact of it and keep going. 

Instead of going home, he changes out of uniform and goes to the store. With Ray in the house he has started to run out of food. Even the vegetables are gone. Brad has made a point of not wondering. About any of it, really. If he wonders at how much and how painfully Ray has changed, then he has to wonder if anything he could have done would have prevented it. 

The real answer is that nobody can ever know that, and all Brad can ever do is his job. Even as he thinks it, he shies away from the knowledge that he might have been someone who could have made a call, or answered a text. If Ray had stayed in the first place, maybe this would never have happened, but it’s not Brad’s job to make anybody stay. 

All marines are volunteers. 

He grabs a basketful of milk and eggs and other shit he’s seen Ray devour. Chips, the weird candy Brad’s nieces brought over, already stale, after he’d missed Halloween for a deployment. Throws a few toothbrushes in, without thinking too hard about it. Grabs a four-pack of t-shirts in medium.

The store is busy enough with the after-work crowd that Brad gets one or two double-takes. He fights the urge to cover the bruise. If he brings a hand to it, it will match the stained spread of broken capillaries, blue past the edges of his fingers. Ray doesn’t have a bruise anywhere on him. The cashier rings up Brad’s haul, looking anywhere but his neck. 

He sits in the car with the engine running for a minute or so, mind completely blank. If he were to examine it, it might look something like hyperfocus in reverse, the open-scatter emptiness just enough for him to drive back to his house on autopilot. 

It’s silent in the driveway, low, identical houses falling away on either side, whitewashed and sedate. Brad’s always liked his neighbourhood. For the quiet, for the convenience, for the laissez-faire attitude his neighbours have to him turning the bike on occasion. Ray, as long as Brad has known him, lived in barracks, perpetually unconcerned with moving off-base. Now, he’s probably wearing Brad’s clothes. He might even be asleep on the couch, one leg hanging off the side, angled so he can see the door. It hasn’t escaped Brad’s notice that he moved it a little. Brad grabs the grocery bags and goes inside. It’s stupid to avoid his own damn house. The fact that Ray is in it isn’t even something he particularly wants to change. 

Ray’s nowhere to be seen. The living room isn’t a disaster, barring the blankets thrown over the end of the couch, and further back, in the kitchen, a pile of dishes in the sink Ray is probably leaving on purpose. There’s no reason to think he’s gone, but Brad immediately has a bad feeling. It’s nothing explicable, and nothing covered by training. It’s just a feeling, the prickle over the back of his neck that raises the short hairs; the same feeling he gets before something happens in theatre, the sensation of going into something with a tangible risk. 

“Ray?” Brad puts the groceries down. One of the drawers is slightly ajar, the one with the sharp knives in it that Brad keeps meaning to fix. It doesn’t slide right. “If you insist on squatting, the least you can do is clean up after yourself. I know it’s difficult when you were born and raised in a chicken shed by people with pitchforks, but may I remind you you were also a marine?”

There’s silence in the house for a long moment, before Brad hears a giggle in the vicinity of the bathroom. For a moment, his attention sharpens, everything standing out in alarming detail. He blinks himself out of it and goes to see what the hell Ray is doing. Once, he’d have been predictable to Brad, a constant, no matter how surface-level erratic his mouth was. Now, he’s — Brad brings a hand to the bruise, pressing into the contour of the swelling — now he’s different. 

Brad shoulders open the bathroom door. Ray is picking his teeth with the nail of his severed middle finger, sitting astride the edge of the bathtub with his back to the wall. The blood seems secondary, somehow, even though it’s all over the tub, liberal splatter coating Ray’s thighs and Brad’s last pair of clean boxers. 

If Brad was the kind of person to scream, he might, but the sight is too absurd. Nothing about it is right, but then again. Right doesn’t seem to apply in any space Ray occupies. “Autocannibalism is a little 1933, don’t you think?”

Ray holds the finger up at him with the hand it belongs to. “Does this look _eaten_ to you? I have standards. First it would be your neighbour’s cat.”

If he laughs, Ray wins. Brad holds it in by pure force of will, even though it wants to burst out of him, a match for Ray’s deranged cackling, the endpoint of his ripped-fuel incited hysteria from Iraq. The difference is, when Ray was at war, he was calm to the bone. Brad wouldn’t have had anyone else behind the wheel. 

Ray twirls the finger around in his knuckles as the new one grows from the severed end. 

Brad leans over him and collects the knife. It’s a sushi knife his sister gave him years ago, when she had still been under the mistaken assumption that Brad cooks anything but steak and vegetables when she’s not looking. It’s always been sharp, despite Brad’s lack of particular care for it. Sharp enough to sever a knuckle. “Did you have to use my good knives?”

Ray shrugs, tossing the appendage at the drain, where it sticks, fingertip up, rigor mortis apparently still applicable to dismembered parts. “Could’a chewed it off, but then you’d have probably freaked out.”

Brad doesn’t bother asking why. Much like asking what happened, it doesn’t get anything out of Ray except for a string of nonsense that sounds like words, and what Brad has been able to piece together is just fragments. It’s enough to know that Ray left the Marines and signed right back up to something he would have known better than to risk, if he’d been in his right mind at the time. Brad hadn’t known about the gene. Ray never said anything, so it’s possible he didn’t know either, until somebody, somewhere activated it. 

Either way, it doesn’t really matter. What’s done is done and Ray is the kind of metahuman that cuts his own finger off just to — what? see what happens? The kind who hasn’t quite relearned how breakable ordinary humans are, yet, or what he can do with his own body. Or, more worryingly, the kind who knows and isn’t sure he cares.

“Maybe if you’d cut off your dick,” Brad says, throwing a wet towel at him for the blood. “I’d have had to call the reporter. He’s into that.”

Ray rolls his eyes at him. “Be serious, Bradley. You don’t call people.”

“I take it back, Ray. Next time, you should cut off your dick first, just to give you a fighting chance of sparing the world your genetically disadvantaged progeny running around bleeding on everything. Whatever’s wrong with you is probably contagious, like mad cow.”

“And we’re back to cannibalism. If I’d known you had a fetish I could have made that happen for you, but I’m offended now.” Ray gestures at the finger, beginning to list at an angle. “Look, he’s sad. You missed your chance.”

The new middle finger is almost the right size now. Twenty-three minutes, Brad remembers. He wonders if it’s the same every time. “If that thing fucks up my garbage disposal, I’m gonna make you fix it.”

“That’s the gayest thing you’ve said today,” Ray tells him, wiping ineffectually at the blood. “I’m proud of you.” He hands Brad the ruined towel. 

“Should I be trying to find you a pig farm to go live on, so you can go back to your roots?” 

Ray tilts his head at such an angle that Brad almost thinks he’s about to snap his own neck, just to prove some obscure point. “It’s not like I do this every day,” Ray informs him, as if that should be obvious, and he resents having to explain it. “Jeez. I cut off one tiny finger and you get all bitchy at me about it. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, and I have got to tell you, that notion has been fucking dispelled by your gigantic ass coming in here and giving me the whole spa treatment. Hot towels and everything. I’d never have dreamed that up, not even when there was nothing to look at but a damn light bulb. Well, until I ate it. That wasn’t much fun either.” Ray wiggles his new middle finger, curling his other fingers down and waving it in Brad’s direction. “Manicure next?”

“As long as you don’t use my kitchen knives,” Brad says, grabbing the finger out of the drain. He doesn’t look too closely at it. It’s a biohazard, but more importantly, it’s Ray’s, blunt and thick-knuckled, a match for his wide hands. Brad makes it back to the kitchen without really looking where he’s going, and drops it down the disposal. The grinding noise is vile. Brad stares at the lid and decides not to lift it. Jesus. 

When he’s done he seats himself very carefully on the couch, unsure whether it now contains a small arsenal of household weapons. All it does is squeak a little and smell like Ray, which is more of a surprise than Brad is expecting. 

He scrolls through his contacts until he reaches Nate. Maybe the number is still current. There’s no reason it wouldn’t be, unless he’s got some kind of work phone Brad doesn’t know about. He might. _You don’t call people._ Ray’s matter-of-fact pronouncement was not something Brad wanted to focus on, but even looking at his list now, Brad can’t really deny it. 

He never asked Nate why he left the Corps, but at the time it had seemed pretty obvious. Nate had never said a word about a meta gene, but Brad watched more than one bullet bend around him like Nate was some kind of parabolic shield. By the end of the drive, he’d looked almost dead, spare and hollowed out and powerless. It hadn’t seemed to work at a distance, and Brad had usually been too far away to think it would save anybody in his victor. Still, every time a bullet landed, Nate looked worse. He’d probably have advice, if Brad called him. It might even be good advice.

Fuck it. No. He can solve this himself. So what if he’ll have to buy new towels on a weekly basis. 

This isn’t something Brad wants eyes on. He spreads a hand over the base of his throat, feeling the bruised warmth, the slow pace of healing sure to turn it green and brown before it disappears completely. He hadn’t fought it, not really, until the reflex had taken over. With anyone else, Brad would have disengaged immediately, but it was Ray, back from the dead and full of something a lot like madness. Brad presses down, feeling his breath begin to labour. 

“Don’t panic and kill yourself!” Ray yells, strolling into the living room damp and mostly devoid of blood, clothes unaccounted for. He spots the grocery bags on the counter and gives a delighted yelp. “Shit, did you buy me candy?” He makes a beeline for the kitchen, leaving a trail of wet footprints across the floor. Brad watches him bite into a packet of chocolate-covered something as though it’s wronged him, chewing a bit of the plastic packaging in with his first mouthful. “I could kiss you right now,” he says, leering with his mouth open. 

“Don’t you fucking dare,” Brad mutters, willing his stupid, stupid dick to agree. 

“Whatever,” Ray says, swallowing hard. “I’ve got a hot date with this, anyway.” 

Brad watches as Ray, one-handed, flips open the pack of t-shirts and grabs one, pulling it over his head without comment. Absurdly, Brad is glad to see it, if only because fewer of his will get ruined from here on. Then again, nothing about any of this is a safe bet. Brad isn’t sure what the sensation is that’s taken root somewhere in his body and refuses to go away, but it’s nothing he’s really felt the like of before. It will probably fade, just like the bruise. It’s nothing he can’t handle.

-

**June, 2006**

The first time Ray calls the napkin number, he ends up at a bus station in the middle of the night. 

It would be sketchy as hell if Ray had anything to fear from bums and crackheads, but as is, even if someone sticks a needle right in him the worst that’ll happen will probably be a rash or something. Hitching over here had been similarly unexciting. Even creepy truckers in California seem pretty chill about strangers standing in the middle of the road and refusing to move until they agree to a detour to a sketchy bus station nowadays. The world is going mad, truly. 

Ray thinks whoever’s offering five hundred bucks for someone to scare the crap out of a small-time dealer is probably overpaying, but it’s not like Ray has an hourly rate set. Besides, it’s been nice and all, being a kept man, but Ray doesn’t see why he should extend his threshold for boredom any further. It’s already been pulled out of shape like taffy, stretched and stretched and streeeeetched until — anyway. Bus station. Sketchy dude to find, scare shitless, and take a picture of. 

Brad’s wallet is a touch lighter this evening. Ray needed a camera, so buying a phone seemed like a good idea at the time. In the two years since he’s held one, they’ve gotten paradoxically bigger. He’d said as much to the guy at the store, but the guy hadn’t been interested in Ray’s scintillating conversation. 

The description Ray’s been given is what he imagines casting calls for scumbags of the week on crime shows might be like: bad teeth, an 88 tattoo — which, gross, come on — probably hanging around in the terminal with a baggie of rock. Ray hasn’t asked what he’s done, but that’s not the end of the world. He can improvise. 

He sits down on a bench and waits. Sure enough, the same asshole cruises past a couple times, and the third time Ray spots the tattoo. Back of the hand, it’s too damn easy. This is nearly boring already, but hey. Money. Ray hasn’t had that in a while, either. 

He gets up and follows him after the third pass, deciding not to be offended that tonight’s scumbag thinks he looks like he could be a crackhead. Ray’s learned to let things slide. 

The guy blinks blearily at him when he reaches his corner, sensing a customer. “Hey man, you buying?”

“See, I can forgive you for thinking that,” Ray tells him, opting for magnanimity. “I know this face—” he gestures, crowding into Chester Allan’s space with a grin, “might lead you to believe I’m the kind of guy who you might encounter late in the evening with cash to spare, but—” 

“Look, if you’re not buyin’, you can fuck—”

“No, no, let me finish! Chester, right? Let me finish, Chester.” Ray pulls out the knife he’s snagged from Brad’s psychotic collection. It’s not that big, but it’s sharp, which is probably more important. Ray doesn’t need to impress upon Chester Allan Esquire the size of his penis. The blood and screaming will do that fine. Chester plasters himself right into the corner like he’s going to melt into the wall. Eesh, he really does have awful teeth. “As I was saying,” Ray goes on, “I’m not here for pleasure.” He pauses, pressing the knife into Chester’s bony sternum. “There, was that so hard? It’s just common courtesy, dude.”

Chester Allan squirms, trying to back away. “Did Jorge send you?”

“Sure, probably,” Ray admits. “I’m a contractor, if you want to get hung up on technicalities. So let’s make it easier for us both and just go on the count of three, okay?”

“What are you—”

Ray backhands him with the hilt of the knife, and Chester goes down like a bowling pin. The blade sort of ends up in Ray’s palm and feels way less cool than it looks, but one of Chester’s rotten teeth goes flying so Ray is counting it a win. There’s a lot of blood for minimal effort. 

“Tell him I’ll get him the money! I didn’t know it was his private stash, I didn’t, I’ll get him the—”

Ray holds up a finger. “Cut! One second, man. Just gotta reset, can you go back to one? Nice, just like that, keep bleeding, annnnd we’re rolling, go!” He holds up the camera, making sure it’s in focus. “Apologise for your wrongdoing.”

Chester does, profusely and at length, before Ray decides he should probably stick a pin in it and hit the road. “Cut! Can we assume this means you’re going to mend your thieving ways?” Chester is just straight-up crying now. Ray pockets the phone, then crouches down to look at him. “Come on, it’s not that bad. I barely hit you.”

“He’ll kill me, man,” Chester mutters, “I don’t got that kinda cash, I don’t—”

Ray fishes a set of car keys out of Chester’s hoodie. “I assume this is a piece of shit, then?” Chester moans. Ray takes it for assent. “Okay, so you wouldn’t get much out of selling it? I have some transport expenses I’d like to recoup.” 

No answer, so Ray can’t be blamed for jumping to conclusions. 

When he hits the parking lot there are a few cars which might fit the bill. Ray discovers that his new ride is a yellow pontiac without a back bumper and about a quarter tank of gas. It’s also got garbage all over the seats, but nobody ever said crackheads were neat. It rattles when it starts, and then, as if by divine providence, the radio kicks to life to the tune of Dolly Parton singing about Jolene taking her man. Ray sings along all the way back to town, imagining Brad’s face when he hits the high notes. 

By the time he reaches the bar he’s pretty much out of gas and has programmed every button on the clapped-out radio to go straight to the same country station. He leaves it parked across a few spaces, mostly because the brakes are a little hinky. Whatever, he can fix them later. 

“Hail the conquering hero,” Ray announces, breathing in the scent of beer and flop-sweat. The place is rammed out, people moving in a moist-looking mass as he tries to spot a good path to the bar. In the end he just goes for it, his face mashing against a really tall woman’s boobs, so hey, bonus. 

Ray has learned that the bartender goes by Fuck You, which is something he can get behind, not least because it gives him the opportunity to name her something new every time. Tonight Ray’s going for Jim. He knew a decent Jim once. 

Last time Ray was here, there was an altercation with some wizards. This time, the browned carpet remains unsullied by blood, and the bikers in the booth by the window mostly avoid looking at him after Ray grins in their direction and grabs his dick. Grand Wizard appears to be absent, which is a shame. Ray has no hard feelings, especially if he’s willing to eat some crow and admit Ray is top dog. 

Funny, he’d never much cared about that kind of thing before, but maybe living in a collar for a while imprints on mentality or something. Poke would know. Anyway, Tonight-You’re-Jim is in her spot behind the bar like she hasn’t moved in days, propping up the bottom shelf booze with a piece of gum obnoxiously obvious in her fishlike mouth. Maybe she’s also a mutant, and she gets randomly stuck to things. That would suck, though arguably not as much as being immortal. 

Ray leans over the bar between two ladies of the night, one of whom gropes his ass. Ray loves it here. “He’s dead, Jim,” Ray says, in place of ordering a drink.

“He better fucking not be,” Not-Jim answers, pouring Ray a shot of tequila. What is it with people and giving him tequila?

“I hate tequila,” Ray tells her, downing it. “Also he might be dead by now, he said something about Jorge coming after him, but I sure as hell didn’t kill him. He just cried a little, it really wasn’t very exciting. You’d think he never got punched in the face before, which seems unlikely. Statistically and shit.”

“Let’s see it,” Not-Jim says, clearly bored. 

Ray fishes out his brand new phone. The ladies bracketing Ray’s hips pay him very little attention, trying to get Not-Jim to serve them a drink. Ray plays the video, leaned over the bar with someone’s hand just above his ass. Not-Jim snorts. “Well, you’ve got style, I’ll give you that.”

“What can I say?” Ray grins. “I’m an artist.”

Not-Jim rolls her eyes, but she holds up a long finger anyway, ducking down out of sight. When she emerges she hands Ray an envelope, liberally grease-stained. Ray counts the contents. It really is five hundred dollars. Fuck, that was easy. “That was really fucking easy.”

Not-Jim looks unimpressed. “Three-fifty for the tequila.”

“You’re a common criminal, charging people money for turpentine and calling it alcohol,” Ray informs her. “I ought to report you.”

“Tell it to your cop boyfriend, I’m sure he cares.”

Ray is about to correct her, then thinks better of it. Brad would be mad. “Two for the ladies,” Ray says instead, laying a ten on the bar and slipping back through the crush. 

When he emerges into the night air, the yellow pontiac is waiting, disappointingly unstolen. “Typical,” Ray tells it. “Looks like I’m stuck with you.” 

He buys gas and beef jerky with his ill-gotten gains, then heads back across town as the sun is coming up. He parks across Brad’s driveway and slams the door on the way in. Brad is standing against the kitchen island eating his robo-flakes with mechanical precision, probably just about to go for one of his deeply unholy 6am five mile runs. Why he does it when he doesn’t have to Ray has no idea, but it’s about as explicable as his ability to eat before he goes. It just defies logic, reason and human physiology. Ray throws beef jerky at him. Brad dodges without spilling his milk.

“Shall I assume you managed to find the only cows available for tipping in the whole county?” he says, resuming his breakfast. “I hear that’s what country-bred degenerates such as yourself consider premium entertainment.”

Ray presses past him. No use wasting good jerky. He picks it off the floor and shoves most of it in his mouth. “I could have had a hot date, Brad. It could have been something special.”

“While I have no doubt you’re making the most of your newfound freedoms, you smell like the ass end of a cow.”

“As if you’ve ever been near a cow in your life,” Ray says through a mouthful of breakfast meat. “I’ll have you know I smell like blood and old takeout.”

Brad dumps his bowl in the sink, crowding right into Ray’s space. “Take a fucking shower, before I drown you in one.”

“Now, now,” Ray says over his shoulder. He winks at where the camera would be; it seems to come and go somehow, halfway between Reporter’s stupid Nikon and the testing broadcast Ray remembers so vividly. “Remember what happened last time?”

He feels Brad’s breath hitch, displacement in the air by his ear just a shade too fast; Brad is only centimetres away, but it feels like less, the space between them charging slowly with the warmth of proximity. Ray’s bare arm brushes Brad’s ludicrous moisture-wicking running shirt, nerves firing in the wake of it. The alcohol is gone and in its place is just heat, just Brad taking way too long to move away. The mottled spread of sickly green and broken capillaries over the front of his throat has faded, but Ray remembers almost too well the feeling of Brad’s breath under his palm, the thundering pulse under his fingertips, the hard resistance of the meat beneath the skin. Brad remembers what happened last time, too, all right. 

If Ray waits for Brad to actually touch him it might be an eternity, but he’s got time to spare. The whole concept seems less solid than it used to, what with all the lost time being dead sort of gained back in all the times he’s become recently undead. That’s probably an equivalence. He grabs Brad’s ass, pulling him the rest of the way in. “The safeword is Trombley,” he says. “Now what was that about drowning me in the shower?” 

Brad braces his hands on Ray’s hips and tries to pull back. Ray doesn’t feel like letting him, so despite the atrocious strain of ligaments in his arms, he holds him flush. “Let me go, Ray.”

“What’s the magic word?”

Brad twists in his hold and ducks under Ray’s grabbing hand, but not before Ray gets confirmation: Brad’s about as resistant to the idea as he was to being choked, which is to say he looks freaked out but his dick disagrees. Ray strips off his shirt and drops it on the floor for Brad to grimace at. Pants next, and Ray’s been flying commando this evening, so he ends up in just his socks and shoes, enjoying the work Brad’s faintly bruised throat is doing to keep the panic off his face. 

“I’m gonna take a bath,” Ray announces. “Treat myself, you know? You didn’t even ask how my day was, and now I’m offended. Maybe I’ll even cry a little, let it all out.”

Brad’s beginning to look determined. Ray’s fired up, heady with the success of a good night and the edge of danger he can sense, Brad’s hands starting to curl by his sides, all thoughts of a run seeming to be dissipating as his irritation builds. Perfect. Ray wants a little bit of a fight, a little bit of a challenge after tonight. It was so easy. Brad will make it hard for him, if Ray makes him. With Brad, he’ll feel it. 

Ray grins at him and walks away, doing exactly what he said he’d do. The bathtub fills up with alacrity. Nothing less than the best for Brad Colbert, who’s in this house six months a year tops, whose stuff all looks the same, whose entire life is order. Ray isn’t surprised he has a little streak of murder in there. Ray’s been there. He knows. 

Still, it takes him soaking for a good ten minutes before Brad shows up. What finally cracks him is Ray singing the rubber duckie song at the top of his lungs, enjoying the echo of his voice bouncing off the tiles. Space to the high ceiling, and a frosted window high in the wall, and plenty of room to sink down below the water. 

Brad appears in the doorway and Ray’s almost-there erection makes up its damn mind right then. “Stop yowling,” Brad says, shirt already gone. “It’s ungodly.”

“God’s got bigger problems.” Ray wiggles his fingers above the waterline, mixture of weird foams turning a strange greenish colour. “Famine, pestilence, the real housewives of Atlanta—”

Brad crosses the room in three steps, thumping to his knees by the tub with one hand spreading over the top of Ray’s skull, the other pressing into his chest, wrist deep below the water. 

Breathing gets harder all of a sudden, Brad’s weight just beginning to bear down across Ray’s sternum. He grabs Brad by the wrist, dragging his palm lower, between his thighs. “Go big or go home, dude. I ain’t got all day.”

“Seems to me like you’ve got all the time in the world,” Brad says, and shoves him under the water. 

In the moment he goes under, Ray has his eyes open, just to catch the look on Brad’s face. Blankness, the battle-ready mask Ray knows as well as the inside of his own eyelids. Maybe better, considering these eyelids date from after Iraq. The panic unspools in his gut at the same time as Brad starts to get him off, and the friction is too good and too hard at the same time, just enough to tide him over before his lungs start screaming. Ray hasn’t got enough air to last, but he waits until his eyes are throwing desperate starbursts to start struggling. 

Maybe it takes Brad by surprise, because he almost lets him up, but then, just as Ray thinks the game might be over, he might get a gulp of air and an I-told-you-so, Brad shoves him back down, holding him at head and hips until Ray is just insensible enough to come with an open mouth. 

The next thing he knows, he’s heaving water all over the bath mat, Brad’s hand pounding him under the diaphragm as the water leaves his lungs with a last, soapy burn. Ray flops over on his side, grinning up at him. Brad is soaked, pale, and not even slightly hard anymore, a red stain high on his cheeks as he sits back across the soaked floor. 

“Aw,” Ray croaks, “did you finish without me?”

Brad swallows, bruise pale green against his ashen skin. “I’m going to be late for work. Clean this shit up.”

Ray is taking it as a yes, even if Brad leaves before Ray can stop laughing, tiles cold and slick at his back. It hurts to breathe, and even minutes later there are still bruises on his chest, fading away as he watches, pressing into the last mark before it goes. 

Oh yeah. He felt it. 

Maybe Ray falls asleep right there and maybe he doesn’t. He’ll never tell. 

The next time he calls the number, he throws a guy off a bridge. It’s less exciting than it sounds, because dude is a good swimmer and the bridge is only eight feet up, but Ray gets a wallet and a laugh out of it. 

He catches Brad as he’s coming back from work, eight pm as the sun’s dipping, and Brad’s been going a little too fast on the bike. Ray provokes him into crushing him up against the workbench in the garage, Brad’s fingers in his mouth tasting of gasoline and motor oil. Ray bites marks into his knuckles and Brad mutters something about rabies, blood tasting as clean as it ever has.

The time after that, Ray loses a thumb to a chainsaw and gets two thousand dollars out of it, staggering back into the house with Thai food and bees beneath his skin, itching for something to take the pull of healing out from under it. Brad slams him down over the kitchen island and pins him there with a knife through his shirt, and if Ray leaves a bruise above his navel that looks like a cannonball strike, it’s nobody’s fault. Maybe there’s blame to parcel out, but Ray’s not interested in doing the math.

-

It should probably alarm Brad more than it does, how quickly the fucked up novelty tapers off into routine. Predictable unpredictability.

Ray falls asleep in a heap on the couch, face half mashed into the cushions, one arm crumpled under his chest and one knee drawn up tight. His other leg hangs off the couch, foot grazing the floor. He looks like an animal, improbable position achieved only with the aid of nonhuman joints. 

He’s snoring a little. Brad should be pissed off. It’s not loud, but it’s manifestly a noise in his space, something disruptive to his calm. He should stop looking at Ray and go put on pants; it’s eight in the morning and Ray’s been out all night doing his shitty impression of a superhero and has staggered back flush with ill-gotten cash and a stab wound, complete with a knife sticking hilt-first out of his chest. According to Ray, it had been too much effort to pull out at the scene and deal with pneumothorax there when he could just do it in the shower. Fluid’s fluid. 

Brad should worry how quickly he’s gotten used to that. It’s easy to get used to regular sex, no matter where it’s coming from. Even if it’s coming from Ray Person, half-ration skinny and sharp in all the places Brad’s always liked a soft curve, a stretch of warm skin. 

More often than not, Ray is new-skin pink in a patchwork over his jagged bones, a shit-eating grin and yellowed teeth where they haven’t been knocked out and grown back white, clipper-fuzz close to the skull instead of hair long enough to hold. He smells like smoke and blood and the ass-end of that yellow piece of junk he picked up out of a scrapyard somewhere, and Brad’s been sticking his dick in him like it’s going out of style. Once or twice, it’s even been vice versa, Ray biting tracks into the back of Brad’s neck as though he can never quite remember that Brad will bleed, or just doesn’t care. 

That’s not the problem. Brad’s not going to pussy out over a bitemark or five. The hiss of Ray’s lung losing air as he deep-throated Brad in the kitchen before Brad went for his run made up for pulling a scab off with his t-shirt after. The problem is that Ray’s back from the dead, and seems in no hurry to explain it. 

The truth is, Brad hasn’t really asked.

He talks a big talk about making do, but even he can’t deny he thrives on intel. It’s why he’s recon, and frankly, if he can’t gather some for himself, he’s a multimillion-dollar sinkhole for advanced specialist training. He should be ashamed of himself. 

Ray snuffles into the couch cushion, muttering something under his breath before he turns violently over, ending up in a sprawl with one of the throw pillows clutched in a fist. Brad yanks himself away, only just aware that he’s staring. He hasn’t been late for work more than twice in over a decade, and he’s not going to expand his streak now. He leaves, and makes it in on time. 

It takes him until lunch to chew through his resupply and requisition paperwork, during which time he’s not really thinking of much except the task at hand. It’s not until he catches a glimpse of himself in a window as he’s heading out for a burrito that he pulls up short. He looks tired. He doesn’t feel it, but he looks unrested, a little puffed around the eyes. Jesus, if he spends any more time staring at his reflection they’ll write him up with psych. Nevertheless, preoccupation isn’t his MO, and Brad knows himself well enough to realise that the pressing question in the back of his mind is going to have to be answered before he takes his teeth out of it. Even as a part of him recognises this as a criminal lack of mission-critical flexibility, he finds himself turning down the hall and up the ranks. 

Captain Patterson is in his office when Brad knocks. 

Brad stands at attention briefly before Patterson puts him at ease, one eyebrow raised. “Staff Sergeant. This is a surprise.”

“Permission to ask a question, Sir.”

“Granted.” Patterson sits back in his chair, second eyebrow joining the first halfway up his forehead. “I get one first, though. Did you speak to Lieutenant Parejo?” Brad answers in the negative, waiting to see whether Patterson’s going to make a thing out of it. Luckily, Patterson’s not a piece of shit, so he lets it slide. It’s not like Brad’s in the habit of grossly violating protocol. “What can I do for you, Colbert?”

“Sir.” Brad thinks how to phrase this without pulling up a whole line of red flags right down to medical for an eval. “In my report from Afghanistan we specified metahuman contact. I’m wondering if we have reason to expect more in the future. Preparative training would need adjustment.” 

Patterson frowns, apparently giving it serious thought instead of turfing Brad out of his office. Brad doesn’t think too hard about what it means that he’s in here at all. 

“That’s an interesting observation,” Patterson allows, without giving anything away. “What makes you think we might have greater contact in future?”

 _The headcase on my couch._ “Sir. No reason.” The time to mention Ray came and went the first time Ray’s fingers left evidence on Brad’s skin and he walked onto base daring anyone to notice it. “Call it a hunch.”

“We have no intel related to an upswing in metahuman engagement right now,” Patterson says, apparently willing to roll with the line of questioning, even if Brad is running on the flimsiest of pretexts. “However, that’s a valid training question. I’ll make a note of it.”

Brad nods, stands back at attention, and waits to be dismissed. 

Patterson doesn’t seem willing to let him go yet. It will take more than that for Brad to reassess him as not a waste of air, but in that moment he wants nothing more than to be released so he can forget the transgressive urge to find out what the hell kind of black hole Ray fell into that spat him out the other side immortal. Patterson taps a finger on the desk. “Colbert. Do you have something that’s battalion-relevant?”

“No, Sir.” It’s not a lie. All he has is Ray and Ray’s word of mouth, filtered through three years of absence and a heavy dose of derangement. It’s not intel. That’s the problem. “The meta had combat-critical mutations. Just following up.”

“I see.” Patterson doesn’t look thrilled, but he doesn’t look likely to bust Brad’s ass for this, which is a win for a risk. Patterson dismisses him and he goes. 

The rest of the day is a blur of meetings, paperwork, and a quick drink after work with a few other sergeants. Brad isn’t particularly with it, occupied with turning over the potential problem of some kind of program unleashing things like Ray into combat theatres without the knowledge of military intelligence. The more he thinks about it the less likely it seems, but Patterson’s lack of information hadn’t seemed faked. It’s too big a picture for Brad’s scope, even as he makes an attempt to focus through the eye of a beer bottle, answering a jibe with half-hearted venom.

When he gets home, Ray is out. The yellow pontiac he’s given a series of names to is nowhere to be seen, and the couch is devoid of anything but a set of boxers and an old burger wrapper. Brad debates just leaving it, but finds himself incapable of standing the mess after a day of frustration. He tosses the boxers in the laundry and the wrapper in the trash, then sits down on the couch with his laptop. 

He thinks twice, then three times, about firing off the email. Back when they sent him to Quantico for spec ops personnel training, Brad made a contact with one of the recruits off a different program. It’s not quite CIA, but it’s not quite anything else. Brad figures that covering his tracks will look shady as hell, so he just phrases it casually: _Settle a debate for me. Metahuman recruiting for embedded ops?_

Brad pulls dinner out of the freezer, throws something on the TV, thinks about what he can do with the bike this weekend, and doesn’t wait for the slam of the front door, or the telling whine of a crappy engine clogging up his driveway. 

Brad makes it halfway through the news before he checks his email. _Not a chance. Too many margins of error._

There’s about a 50-50 chance that if Brad tries to write back it’ll bounce. 

Nothing. Fucking crickets. Whatever Ray stumbled into in some bar somewhere and briefly lost his mind enough to sign up for before the rest of it flew the coop isn’t listed anywhere Brad can see or find. The answers are just rolling around somewhere behind Ray’s eyes, buried in whatever’s left of his original brain, the one that sometimes, Brad thinks, comes to the surface, in moments when Ray’s quiet, when he’s hard to the touch, rigid with unseen tension. 

Then it melts, and Ray grins, and all Brad gets is some shit about stopwatches, Ray’s fingers twitching into a fist, or curling into his shirt, and then nothing. Just noise, blood, laughter and the lingering taste of blood. What’s worse is that Brad will take it over the alternative any time, and that thought alone is enough to send him to bed, furious at himself for almost waiting up for Ray to come back.

-

**August, 2006**

Ray lets himself in singing under his breath, stumbling around in the hall. Brad catches a snatch of a melody, Ray yowling, “Street boy, what’s your style!” before the movement stops. A while later, he sings the rest, “—your dead end streets don’t make you smi-ile—” travelling through the wall. 

Brad doesn’t sleep through loud bangs, especially when the loud bang is his own front door. The fact that Ray stole his keys and copied them doesn’t seem to make his entrances any quieter, so Brad stares up at the bedroom ceiling, listening to Ray flop around on the couch in the living room, singing until he fucking stops. 

He’s about to turn over and go back to sleep when Ray hacks a cough so wet and disgusting Brad can hear it through the wall. 

He stares at the ceiling, frozen, listening for another sound. Ray groans. It could easily be the sound of someone coming off a bender. Brad should go back to sleep. Ray coughs again, and this time Brad is listening to begin with, so he hears it, the faint thump, the low giggle, the way Ray starts to sing again. _Ch-ch-ch—_

“Fuck it.” Brad throws the sheet off and rolls out of bed. 

He flicks on the light in the living room and stops dead in his tracks. There’s blood everywhere, cream couch stained like some kind of fucked up strawberry syrup exploded all over it, except the smell is unmistakably warm and coppery. Ray points at him, humming, blood soaking his arm beginning to dry. “Cherry bomb!”

Brad swallows, heart pounding. “Sitrep.”

Ray hacks, producing an extended kind of gagging sound, the way Brad remembers his mother’s cats throwing up hairballs, and spits out a bullet, a glob of congealed blood and a half-chewed french fry. 

“Jesus.”

Ray giggles, chest only rising on one side, left arm a pulped mess across his ruined chest. “See,” his voice comes out with a harmonic wheeze, “I always thought it was bullshit, you know, when Rudy kept saying fast food wasn’t real food.” He looks at the rug, grinning. “Score one for fruity Rudy.” 

Brad watches another bullet leak out of Ray’s throat, pushing through the bloodstained skin. It is absolutely disgusting. He can’t look away. 

Ray makes a pleased noise. “Much better.” 

His voice sounds different immediately, so Brad surmises the bullet must have been lodged near the vocal cords. It’s easier to think about that as Ray slowly pulls his body back together on Brad’s ruined couch than it is to watch it happen. The total as he watches is eight bullets, three french fries and copious amounts of some gelatinous goop halfway between clotted blood and solidified lymph. If Brad were less transfixed he’d be hurling. 

“You gonna tell me why you look like the clown people shoot at carnivals back in Sisterfuck, Missouri?”

“Shit, dude,” Ray says, arms thrown up to the ceiling, wiggling his fingers, “how was I supposed to know they’d go batshit? People are touchy these days, Brad. I think it’s political correctness run wild.”

“I’m sure your diplomatic approach was appreciated.”

Ray looks mournfully at him. “You set _one_ garage full of heroin on fire.” He shakes his head, neck cracking like a gunshot. “Everyone’s a critic.”

“And if they followed you?”

“Who the fuck bothers following a corpse? That doesn’t make any sense.” Ray fixes him with a stare. “Dead’s usually dead, unless you’re me, and maybe, like, one other guy.”

“Hello, Brad,” Brad whines, in a passable imitation of Ray’s most irritating voice, “I pissed off some drug dealers and came home to die on your couch like a raccoon under the porch!” He takes a step closer, casting an eye over the damage. “Does that sound like it makes sense? Sometimes I think you can’t actually hear yourself when you talk.”

“Brad.” Ray looks up at him, the picture of (literally) wounded innocence. “Is this about your off-white-eggshell-cream upholstery? Is this the limit past which the great Brad Colbert will not be pushed? The mild staining of a Miami cocksucker’s front room set?”

Brad elects not to pick up that thread. “I expect you to make it up to me.”

“It’s just blood, dude. You’ve got like, two gallons of this shit in you right now, just sort of doing its thing.” He laughs. “If anyone were watching us they’d probably point out it’s less than that. People can be really pedantic about blood. I’m adjusting for inflation because — I don’t know if you’ve noticed — you’re gigantic.”

Brad forces himself not to laugh. It’s not really funny, but Ray is bleeding so unrepentantly that it almost seems like it might be. Brad finally gives in to curiosity and steps the rest of the way in, bare toes curling involuntarily at the damp, tacky feeling of bloody rug. There’s a hole in the side of Ray’s chest; Brad glimpses it through what’s left of his — Brad’s — stolen gym shirt, ribs rising and falling on both sides now, intercostals slowly regaining purchase on the bone. Brad fights the trained-in urge to apply pressure, to press the edges of Ray’s skin together and hope. Watching the healing isn’t really an exercise in fascination so much as it is an anatomy lesson: all the ways in which a body can be damaged. The difference is, Ray’s obeys some genetic mandate to chase its atoms back together. One of the stars on his chest is almost gone, new skin pink around the edges as it reforms. No ink in it. Something twists, low and deep, beneath Brad’s navel.

He puts a hand on Ray’s sternum, looking him in the eye. 

“Did you know your common or garden scumbag has hollowpoints now?” As if to punctuate Ray’s statement, a few shards of metal work their way out around Brad’s palm. “What’s the world coming to?”

“That’s why they’ve got you, patrolling the streets like you think you’re Batman.”

Ray grabs his shirt, wide-eyed outrage only half faked, if Brad is any expert. “Take that back. Batman’s some crazy one-percent asshole who beats up petty crooks for fun.”

“So what’s in it for you? The glory?”

“Please.” Ray squirms under Brad’s palm, muscle layering back over bone, skin creeping closer to whole. “I’m in it for the money.”

“Yes, Ray, those one-dollar bills you find in gutters must really—”

Ray strokes his fingers across Brad’s throat. The rough pads skate his adam’s apple, pressing harder and harder until Ray rests his index nail in the hollow of Brad’s suprasternal nodge, pressure just enough to hurt. Brad grabs his wrist, Ray’s chest taking more of his weight. Almost all of it. 

“Take it back,” Ray says, chest deflating, staying down for too long before he forces a breath in. 

Brad presses down. Just a little harder. 

Ray grabs him by the back of the neck. In the split second before Ray deploys his freakish disregard for his body, Brad sees his eyes glaze over. In combat situations, Brad is familiar with time’s plasticity: it dilates and compresses, filtered through the mind, washed with adrenaline. 

Ray’s pupils dilate, and Brad resists, Ray’s white-knuckle grip on the back of his neck painful in the best way as Ray tries to drag him down. The exposed slivers of muscle in his chest bunch, rising past the skin, breaking it back to threads. The fresh blood trickles between Brad’s fingers, getting under his nails, soaking into the lines. “No.”

“You’ll have to be more specific,” Ray whispers, locking his legs around Brad’s waist and rolling them right off the couch. 

Brad lands under him, Ray’s weight warm and wet, blood still sluggishly leaking from a dozen tiny wounds, the aftermath of much, much larger ones. Brad can feel it at his back, the carpet unsalvageable, the sticky drag of it matched by Ray, his knees clamped around Brad’s sides. 

Nothing Brad can do to him will hurt him. 

There’s something dangerous in the knowledge of it, that Brad could stick his fingers under Ray’s skin and hold him with it, and Ray would heal after. The heat in his gut builds, hot blood scent and Ray too close for objective distance, riddled with bullets and mostly whole and terrifyingly infinite. Brad hooks a finger under the last edge of healing skin and pulls. 

Ray makes a noise like — like he might be dying, except —

“Yeah,” he whispers, lips skimming Brad’s, his eyes wide open, a centimetre away, less, the whole of Brad’s field of vision, everything just white sclera, black pupil and the feeling of the inside of Ray’s chest, one layer closer to the muscle of his heart, pounding blood tidal against Brad’s knuckles. 

Brad closes the distance with a bite, holding Ray’s lip between his teeth. There are plenty of things to say, but Brad doesn’t want to hear any of them. Ray spreads his knees, searching for contact, and Brad knows that it’s all right, all of it, even the wrongness of Ray returned out of balance, something objectively not quite human. 

A human man would be screaming. Brad doesn’t want him to scream. He just wants to pull him apart a little, to know in body as well as in mind what Ray is and what Brad could do to him. 

Maybe in the morning, he’ll feel sick about it, but right now, Ray is shifting his hips, working a hand down between them, against Brad’s grip under his skin. 

His hand is blood-slick, and Brad just about manages not to press into it, instead working slowly, incrementally, the way he’s holding Ray. Ray breathes into his mouth, into the space between their teeth, held fast, nearly immobile unless he wants to pull himself apart to get away. 

Brad would let him go, but Ray doesn’t pull. 

Instead, Ray’s grip tightens. The friction is barely ameliorated by the blood, by the sweat pooling in the hollow of his hips, by the drag of Ray’s nails. Brad gives in, releasing Ray’s lip to gasp, only Ray laughs, the rumble in his chest immediate, visceral, going right into the bones of Brad’s hand. 

Ray kisses him before Brad can get a breath, merciless, implacable, thumb skating over the spot on the underside of Brad’s dick that’s hardwired directly to the need in his belly, the heat in his chest. Brad comes silently, seeing stars, just on the edge of desperate. 

He loosens his grip, fingers locked in place protesting. “No fucking way,” Ray mutters, pulling against it, finally, the look on his face somewhere between combat-ready and fucked out. The black wash over his eyes looks like oil in the dim light, lips peeled back off his teeth almost a grimace. “Harder.”

Brad crooks his fingers, new seep of blood drawing a low moan out of Ray, and he feels it all the way down his spine. 

Ray leans against him, letting Brad take the weight, his hand still working between them, but this time Ray manages just enough leverage to slip his pants down, dragging Brad’s boxers down around his thighs. Brad’s skin is sweat-slick and bloodied, and it can’t possibly be smooth, but the rough drag is almost unbearably good, even for Brad, who is still riding the aftershocks of a shattering orgasm. Ray comes with his nose mashed into Brad’s shoulder, one hand clamped around Brad’s bicep, the other digging into the side of his neck. 

Brad pulls his fingers out, and with them comes a rush of fluid, and one last jagged sharp of hollowpoint. 

“Hey-yaaa—” Ray warbles into Brad’s soaked shirt.

“Don’t—” Brad swallows, hoarse. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

Ray cackles. “Grab ya ‘til you’re sore.”

Brad thumps his head into the carpet, once, staring at the ceiling until the lights force his eyes closed. He should get up. He should push Ray off and go do…something. Something about the jizz on his thighs, and something about the blood. 

Instead, he throws an arm over Ray’s back, hooking a thumb in the loose collar of the shredded t-shirt, feeling Ray breathe against him.

-

An indeterminable number of weeks passes in what every bone in Brad’s body protests against calling normal, when it’s built on trouble and mayhem and what has to be gallons of blood soaking into his hardwood floors. A growing white noise at the edges of his hearing, high-frequency, increasingly disruptive.

It’s a Saturday like any other, and Ray is lit the fuck up.

He roams the house in nothing but a bathrobe that bears testament to his inability to eat like a civilised human being, and oversized shades he latched onto with evil, childlike glee. It’s a mood, a terrible whimsical fancy that should be beneath Brad’s notice. He’s suffered through this, first verse to precipitate the next, in Afghanistan and Iraq and training exercises; it amazes him, sometimes, how long he’s known Ray. But Ray calibrates his moods for maximum effect of nails on a chalkboard, and it works every time.

He can’t seem to focus on any one thing for more than two minutes, and occasionally points at Brad and bellows half a line from the song he’s massacring mostly, thank fucking christ, in his head: “You can dance, you can ji-ive, having the time of your life—”

Brad thinks about taking him out to the ocean, pushing him under and keeping him there, the bunch and release of muscle as Ray struggles against the tide, skin chilling in the cold water. His hands itch, whether to touch Ray or to hurt him, Brad doesn’t know. It should probably alarm him more, knowing that he could do both. That he wants to.

If ever there was a line drawn in the sand, _here there be monsters and the monsters are you_ or _when in doubt, don’t fuck the crazy person_ , it’s shifted into near invisibility, redrawn so many times in the privacy of Brad’s internal landscape of right and wrong that it’s useless. He still hasn’t mentioned to anyone at work that Ray is crashing on his couch, eating his food, sometimes napping spread-eagled across his bed in post-orgasmic bliss, arms and legs gone halfway liquid and halfway putty as Brad cleans up. Cleans up blood, more often than not.

Ray’s jittery, unspent energy gets to him. He looks at the optical drive he has spread over the coffee table, taking it apart to pass the time — sand got into it, somehow. It makes a sickly grinding noise any time he tries to run it. If it weren’t for how it had already been broken when Ray showed up, Brad would be suspicious.

Ray is whistling between his teeth. The screwdriver clatters into the glass when Brad drops it; if he doesn’t do something now, he will kill them both, and only Ray would come back from that. Out of pure spite, Brad won’t allow it.

“Put your dick away and get dressed like a real human being,” he orders. Ray automatically reaches down to give his crotch a firm grope. “We’re going out.”

“Oh, Jesus. I knew your bullshit pussy upbringing would ruin all this eventually. Now you’re taking me to dinner like we’re a couple middle aged dykes.”

Once he’s moving, Brad only wants to go. He grabs a wallet and throws the screwdriver at Ray’s face, ignoring the outraged squawk when Ray fails to dodge.

“Get some clothes on. I won’t have you arrested on obscenity charges.”

Miraculously, Ray obeys. He relaxes slightly once he realises where Brad is taking them: the usual shithole bar, where Ray is starting to accumulate something like a poor man’s attempts at a reputation, and no one knows or cares who Brad is. His temper is not as volatile, as loud and screamingly obnoxious, as Ray’s, so he slips under the radar among people too concerned with their own misery and liver damage to look past their glasses, their pool cues, their dicks.

Ray looks right at home. Brad would wonder at his ability to make newly bought t-shirts look lived-in and ratty in the span of a week, would consider it a secondary mutation to Ray’s primary fucking insanity. He picks a table near their preferred one, and lets Ray take the seat that gives him perfect sight lines for the exits.

“So I’ve been thinking,” says Ray, words mangled around the unlit cigarette he sticks in his mouth, tip bobbing as he talks.

“That’s a serious overestimation of your cognitive ability.”

Ray shakes his head, jerks one shoulder in a shrug. His gaze briefly rests on a spot on the wall, off to the side, and he smiles a crooked little _What can you do?_ smile as if at an unseen audience. “Your respect for me is appreciated, as always. No, but check this out: how is it I can only regrow shit on one body? Like if you cut off an arm. How come I grow back an arm, and don’t grow a new body on that arm?”

Like an afterthought, Ray digs out a crumpled match box from his pocket and lights his cigarette. He inhales, exhales the puff of smoke directly in Brad’s face.

“I don’t know, Ray. Maybe you should ask the people who did this to you.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Brad knows that: it’s why he said it. He watches as Ray frowns, the actual worry there quickly overlaid with comical overexpression. Shaking his head in obvious disappointment, Ray puts out the cigarette on the flat of his palm. The stench of burnt flesh is worse than the smoke still clinging to Brad’s nostrils and palate.

They both watch Ray’s skin stitch itself back together around the bullet hole sized wound. Small caliber, Brad thinks. The diameter of his little finger. He’s almost taught himself to stop reacting to Ray’s disregard for his bodily integrity.

He leans back in his seat, stretches his legs. “Why don’t you make yourself useful? Get some beers.”

“On a school night? Colour me shocked.” Ray sticks the cigarette behind his ear and mimes firing a gun. “Kidding. You got it, Big Gay Brad.”

He saunters over to the bar, hip-checking a biker on his way and cackling when the guy stumbles but knows better than to come after Ray; maybe he saw Ray’s party trick before. Maybe the point of maiming himself in plain sight was so no one would bother him. Brad doesn’t have a good view of the bar. Instead, he focuses on the pool table that’s seen better years — better decades. The vinyl of his seat squeaks every time he so much as twitches. In two hours, he and Ray should head back. Brad would like to get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep. He turns towards the bar when he hears Ray’s off-key hacking laughter, but studiously decides he doesn’t care.

Ray comes back with two beers and a piece of paper he tosses onto the table. Brad squints. It has a name and address written on it, the pencil smudged where someone tried to smooth out the folds.

“Stepping out on me? I’m fucking heartbroken. How could you.”

“Oh, yeah. Didn’t I mention that already?” Ray grins, and throws himself back into his seat. “Your mom says hi.”

He starts tapping his foot, immediately, knee knocking into one of the table legs. Brad wants to grab him by the scruff off the neck and drag him to the men’s room, bend him over the sink and fuck him until he starts making sense.

“Homeboy over here,” says Ray, pointing at the piece of paper with the neck of his beer bottle, and Brad reads it over again, memorising both name and address, “owes money to some chick. Now that chick will cough up six hundred bucks, cash, for a shakedown. You in?”

Brad considers this. “Is that your idea of gainful employment? Ray, I don’t know how to tell you this, but you’re probably gonna be the hired muscle to some half-dicked brain-dead retard’s extortion scam.”

“I need to support my crippling Valium addiction while you’re doing your breadwinner warrior shit.” Ray swoons, a little, all limp wrists and fluttering eyelashes, then straightens up again. “Are you in, or is this too offensive to your upper middle class sensibilities?”

 _Go ahead, I’ll see you at home_ , Brad almost says. It’s at the tip of his tongue, words about to stumble past his teeth, but then his brain catches up to his unfiltered stupidity. He doesn’t know when he started to process Ray, them, everything, in those terms. As though Brad’s house is something more than a house where he spends his time off-work and not in theatre. As though Ray belongs there, and it’s normal, natural, an everyday thing where they plan around each other. _I’ll see you at home._ Brad swallows around a vague sense of nausea.

It’s that, or maybe it is the fact that Ray’s personalised brand of crazy is as contagious as Brad keeps suspecting it might be.

He knocks back the rest of his beer and says, “Lead the way, fucking wannabe working class hero.”

And so Ray does. He leads the way into a part of town Brad usually doesn’t frequent, rife with shitty plastic-panelled houses sweating dirty off-white paint. The air is still stale with the heat of the day; the back of Brad’s neck feels sticky and warm, his hands on the steering wheel just this side of clammy. He counts the street signs, green gone almost grey, until Ray tells him to stop a block away from the address from the piece of paper. It only now occurs to Brad that he’s unarmed, and only now does it occur to him to wonder if that’s a bad thing. The potential for violence is tangible, viscous under his skin, but Ray isn’t carrying, either, unless he has a knife stashed somewhere.

Then again: Ray doesn’t have to worry about grievous bodily harm, and the worst of it tends to be self-inflicted, in any case.

The house that bears the right number is a right shithole, a greying bungalow that looks ready to topple under the weight of garbage bags stacked up against one wall. It might have been quaint, once. Now, even the air around it hangs thick with a distinct sewer smell; Brad can taste it on his tongue through the open windows as they pull up to the sidewalk, two houses down the block.

“You take me to the nicest places,” he says, deadpan, but gets out of the car.

Ray fondly flips him off. “Eat a dick.”

He rolls up his sleeves and squints up at the house, down at the piece of paper, and again. Then he shrugs, and they’re on.

Only one light is on inside, a dirty patch of orange spilling into the dried out remnants of a small lawn. They stroll up to the door. Ray knocks, five times, and Brad looks at him with undisguised contempt. There’s movement inside, voices, and when no one comes to greet them, Ray yells, “Mr Greer, it’s Jehovah’s Witnesses, we wanna talk to you about Jesus and shit!”

“Fucking undignified,” Brad mutters under his breath.

“It’s okay,” says Ray, “you can introduce them to the wonders of christ-killing later.” He’s vibrating, almost, a frayed length of wire spitting sparks. His eyes are bright with mean joy, but when he turns to give Brad a quick nod, it’s so fucking familiar it hurts. They could be back in theatre, invading a country one monumental fuckup at a time, driving into a certain ambush with nothing but the absolute certainty that they won’t let each other die.

Brad has to assume the squat, balding man who opens the door is Greer. He’s shorter than Ray, and gives them both a look fit to set curdled milk on fire.

“The fuck do you—”

Ray breaks his nose.

Brad moves out of the way of the spray of blood, slipping into the still, tranquil place inside his head that always waits for him when combat readiness turns into actual combat. Greer moans out a gurgling, wet curse, and staggers back. Ray shakes out his hand, grinning, teeth white against the spatter of blood on his face.

It’s a fucking cliché, what happens next, like a mafia movie or some retarded comic book: they follow Greer inside the house, where three other guys are sitting around a rickety table playing cards under a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. Brad would laugh, if he wasn’t a little busy at the moment watching Ray’s blind spot and holding his own against not-ideal but workable odds. It doesn’t stop Ray: he laughs as he takes a hit, laughs again as he shatters someone’s kneecap with the heel of his boot. The lightbulb sways when someone knocks it aside, one side to the other, twitching lights reminiscent of the way arty fire would throw uneven, brief shadows across humvees and men. Brad doesn’t even remember he has no gun on him, that he’s out of uniform. He and Ray move as though directed, in effortless sync.

It ends with two unconscious bodies slumped next to a couch, one guy crying like a fucking POG as he cradles his busted knee in both hands, and Greer sat in a wooden chair with Ray’s foot placed strategically over his groin.

“Candice really wants her money back,” Ray says, leaning forward. The light makes his face look skeletal. Greer goes a faint shade of green when Ray puts more pressure on his balls. “Where is it?”

“W-what? That’s not — we agreed! She agreed to split it fifty-fifty!”

Ray shakes his head in abject sympathy. “God, that fucking sucks for you, homes. Women, am I right?”

“Yeah,” Greer says, trying to cling to hope. “Yeah, man, she’s a right bitch, she—” He cuts himself off with a high-pitched yell, curling in on himself in pain.

Ray pats his cheek. “Sorry, I give, like, negative fucks. The money.”

Greer starts crying.

Ray sighs, disappointment writ large across his face. Brad can tell he was hoping to do more damage before the night was through.

“Fucking christ. You are the anal warts of people, Mikey. Sarge, could you do me a favour and toss this shithole?”

It’s a relief, one Brad didn’t know he was looking for, to have Ray close enough to lucid and rational in the midst of mayhem to know better than use Brad’s name.

The money, it turns out, is stashed under the couch cushions. Brad has to move the bodies — breathing, but knocked out for a good, long, peaceful nap — to get there, and he only gets there after rooting through closets, the bathroom, under the bed, looking for loose floorboards. Any place other than the one so fucking obvious it makes Brad want to inflict more damage, too, just to get something in return for suffering through the indignity. He wants a goddamn shower, a long and scalding one to wash off the sleaze of it all, the whole situation. He can’t imagine how Ray can do this, the vigilante mercenary shtick, as a part-time hobby thing.

“How much does he owe?” he asks, sifting through the four stacks of bills, crumpled at the edges. At least they don’t smell of ass, after their stint in the couch.

Ray seems to give it serious thought, as if he doesn’t know. “How much is there?”

“Three grand.”

“Then I guess he owes Candice three grand. Law of the jungle, y’know?”

Sleazy is the exact word to describe it. Brad takes the money anyway: he’s little more than a sidekick, here, the hired muscle he accused Ray of being. As soon as they get out, he will be able to put it out of mind, wrap the whole situation in four layers of insulation and forget about it. It’s none of his business, what Ray gets up to when he’s not around, and Brad can choose not to be involved or affected. He can choose not to care.

Greer is still sniffling like a limp-dicked pussy when they leave, and Brad has processed his crying as white noise, background and unimportant. Its sudden absence registers as an anomaly. He turns. He turns just in time, the first muzzle flash still blinding in the lit room, the crack of gunfire like a tire bursting next to Brad’s ear.

The first bullet misses, and in the perfect slow motion of near death focus, Brad sees Greer adjust his aim, squarely at Ray’s chest. Brad moves without thinking, shoves Ray out of the way and doesn’t stop to see where the next bullet has lodged: the wall, Ray’s shoulder, but not his heart or his lungs.

Brad doesn’t think about getting shot. He doesn’t think about anything, except _Not him, motherfucker_ , until he has the gun barrel-first in his hand and his fist connects with Greer’s throat, the sound of it a visceral crunch followed by a breathless gargle. Knee to the stomach, one violent pull to the wrist; another crunch, this time of bone, and as Greer starts to fall, Brad gets him in a chokehold. He holds on until Greer goes limp, then lets him go.

The body hits the floor like a sack of flour, with a weirdly hollow thump.

The civilian body.

Brad takes a step back, one after another, the red glaze receding from his vision. He can’t pull air into his lungs, like it’s his own larynx that was crushed, and that’s —

“Fuck,” he manages. There’s no blood on his hands, but it feels as though there should be.

Behind him, Ray whistles. “Jesus, Brad. Overkill much?”

He sounds completely unconcerned. Brad pushes past him and out of the house, the screen door banging against the frame. The street outside is empty and still oozing daylight warmth. Brad rubs one hand over his mouth, panic or as close as he ever gets so close to the surface that he isn’t sure he won’t start screaming at any moment. There’s a disconnect between his limbs and his head and the frantic hammering of his heart, a flood of belated adrenaline. He feels both outside of himself and trapped inexorably in a skin that fits ill; all that fucking sleaze, seeping into unresisting flesh.

Despite the quality of air, he breathes deeper than is advisable if he wants to keep from hyperventilating. Memories of combat come back to him in all the wrong ways: the comedown after a firefight, the way some guys would get the shakes, hard and uncontrollable like acute delirium tremens, Rolling Stone shivering to pieces in his seat behind Brad and setting the whole humvee out of sync.

A car drives past. Brad watches it as though through a scope, looking for telltale flashes until he forces himself to stop.

He doesn’t do this. He doesn’t brutalise people, _civilians_ , on an impulse that is not survival instinct. He knows how to fucking compartmentalise. In combat, he’s ready to kill, to protect someone else: put the life of a man under his command above that of a civilian, to prioritise one human life over another, to run numbers on those lives, but it’s combat rules. It’s covered by the ROE. It’s his job.

Ray isn’t under his command any longer, isn’t his to protect and act impulsively around, and Ray doesn’t need any kind of protection, anyway, with his DNA warped by whatever was done to him, the quirk of genetics that gives him an eternal, deathproofed edge. He comes back, like the worst and rustiest of bad pennies, and Brad isn’t — they don’t owe each other. They don’t own each other, either.

At the end of it all Brad isn’t Ray, careening off the beaten track, driven by something vibrant and sick, madness like a renewable source of energy. That’s Ray: it’s not Brad.

Brad is in active service, in the service of a country, and a compromise like this —

He swallows, fists clenched tightly enough he can feel his nails digging into the meat of his palms. He’s never gotten compromised like this. He imagines anyone from 1st Recon finding out. What a fucking mess.

It might be a minute or an hour later, time stretched into taffy-like hyperfocus, that he hears a noise behind him, and turns to see Ray walking out of the house. He has a pizza box tucked under one arm like a beloved child, and Brad is suddenly too exhausted to wonder if he took it as compensation. Moral losses, the works. Whatever makes sense in Ray’s brain, these days. Fact: he stole a pizza. He wipes his other hand on his shirt, stretching the cotton and leaving dark smears.

Brad asks, overly conscious of his words, unwilling to distance himself from the act absent orders and ROE, “Did I kill him?”

Instead of replying, Ray seems to bite the inside of his cheek. He frowns, and puts his hand in his mouth, frowns deeper and emerges victorious with what Brad is fairly certain is a molar. Ray licks the tooth, and chucks it directly at Brad’s face.

Brad dodges with a disgusted noise.

“You’re not that tough, dude’s fine,” says Ray, shrugging. The pizza box creaks. “He’ll maybe piss blood for a few days. Teach him a lesson.”

Brad can’t make himself look at Ray directly; instead he keeps him in his peripheral vision, a horror movie flicker that might not be there if he finds the courage to face it. He remembers, suddenly, what Poke told him once, tired beyond human endurance and achingly honest without a quirky veneer: as marines, in-country, they did an ungodly amount of fucked up shit that was nothing more than business as usual in a combat zone. Take the combat zone away, though, and what’s left is just fucked up shit. The kind that lands civilians in prison.

“You’re the Iceman,” Ray reminds him, with a clear and ringing note of exasperation. “Chill under pressure. Don’t tell me you’re gonna pussy out now?”

Brad shoves him against the wall. The shitty white panelling groans and squeaks under Ray’s weight, but he doesn’t seem to notice, or care. The pizza box falls onto dried out grass. Ray takes it in stride, Brad’s hands fisted in the front of his shirt, his gaze darting between Brad’s eyes and neck — the pulse there. Reading his heart rate. It’s what Brad would have done.

That Ray isn’t sane, maybe, but clear-headed and sober, helps. It’s reassuring. Brad thinks, despairingly, _I almost killed for you_.

And then Ray twists out of his grip, strikes at the vulnerable insides of his wrists, doesn’t wait for Brad to react, just grabs him by the scruff and flips their positions until Brad is bent halfway to the ground with one arm twisted behind him at an acutely painful angle, Ray’s hand clamped tightly around the back of his neck, fingertips digging into tendon and meat. Almost the same grip Ray had on his neck when he tried to choke Brad into unconsciousness and managed to get inside the needlepoint space between Brad passing out and snapping, and got his spine broken for his trouble.

The memory, or maybe just the position, having Ray warm and solid and unyielding at his back, is enough that Brad feels his traitor lizard brain respond, heat pooling in the pit of his stomach.

“Brad. Chill the fuck out.”

There is nothing else for Brad to do but obey. His body was trained into deference to orders delivered with enough authority. Ray might have fuck all in terms of authority, but he has as firm a grip on the warm underbelly of Brad’s subconscious as the top of his spine right now.

Brad lets go of the tension pulling him bowstring-tight, relaxes into Ray’s grip, forcing every muscle into compliance. He relaxes into the ache of overtaxed joints: the more pliant he makes his body, the further Ray pushes, as if waiting for boundaries to be drawn only to cross them, but the pain of it is negligible compared to the returns. Weight and heat and control, all wrapped together.

In a voice that sounds like his own again, Brad says, “You were fucking born with a highly developed Ritalin dependence. Don’t tell me to calm down.”

Laughing, Ray lets him go. The place where he had Brad’s neck in a viselike grip itches, as though missing something vital, skin oversensitive to cooling night air. Brad straightens up.

Ray squats down to get to the pizza box he dropped. He gets one slice out and scowls at it before sighing, a sound so dramatic it wouldn’t be out of place in classic Hollywood.

“What the fucking christ is this?” he says, directing the question at the pizza slice he holds like something infected with flesh-eating bacteria. “Brad. Check this shit out. What kind of godless communist gets anchovies, pepperoni _and_ pineapple?”

“A sick motherfucker,” Brad agrees, learning all over again the amount of air his lungs need to keep going.

Ray grins at him, briefly, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, then shoves as much of the slice as he can into his mouth.

On cue, without even starting to chew, he makes exaggerated gagging sounds. He lets Brad pull him along to the car, stolen money lining their pockets. Brad has to assume he’s got all of his teeth back.


	4. Chapter 4

**February, 2002**

“Close the fucking tent flap, Corporal, you’re letting in the draught.”

“Bitch, bitch, bitch,” says Ray, obediently pulling the flap shut. Brad doesn’t let himself shiver. It’s cold inside the tent and it’s cold outside, but that is the entire point. They wouldn’t know they’re alive and getting better at staying that way in extreme conditions, otherwise. “That’s all I’m hearing. _I’m Brad Colbert and I’m a gigantic pussy._ ”

Ray drops down on top of his sleeping bag, goes from standing to sprawling with no in-between stages, a picture of boneless exhaustion.

“Holy fucking shit, dude, it’s cold out there. I feel like my balls have crawled so far up inside my body they’re in my lungs or some shit, and now I’ve got, like, jizz up and down my respiratory system.” He tries to take in a dramatic deep breath, but it cracks on a laugh. “Yep, tastes like cock all right.”

“Jesus christ, Person.” Brad means to leave it at that, since talking back or acknowledging his existence in any way is enough to get Ray going. But Brad is tired, too, and a little wired, and actually? He wants to get Ray going. “How would you know what cock tastes like, anyway? Aside from dreaming about it all day long, three months ago you were the purest goddamn virgin in the entire battalion.”

“Homes, you need to let that shit go. Might give an impression you’re creepily invested in the state of my sex life.” Ray leers, leaning forward into the easy spread of his legs. His hair is damp, and he always looks a little like a shitty garage band wannabe rockstar gone thin from cocaine, energy burning through muscle before it can build, but rarely more so than now.

He flexes his legs. It puts his left foot four inches from Brad’s sleeping bag, and six from Brad’s thigh. He says, “Besides, I’ll have you know my sex life has become a thing of myth and fucking legend since Afghanistan. Chicks dig warrior dudes, not that you’d know. Everyone digs warrior dudes. It’s open season on this sweet ass.”

“Yeah? Everyone?”

Brad can fake casual with two broken legs and one hand tied behind his back, but Ray’s attention sharpens to zero in on him as though he had a deep hard look inside Brad’s head and conjured his intention out of thin air. It’s an impressive feat: Brad isn’t sure himself what it is that he wants or intends. Play with fire and see where it takes him, maybe. He might lose a limb in the process. Where would be the fun otherwise?

“Everyone,” Ray says. Nothing at all has changed in his body language, be he speaks more slowly. He chooses his words instead of watching them fall out of his mouth in a competition to see which hits the ground first. “I know they say we’ll fuck anything, but I’m telling you, you wouldn’t _believe_ the strange and nasty I’ve had trying to get on my dick soon as they hear they might score with a marine. Is it a California thing? I bet it’s a fucking California thing.”

“Yeah, Ray, it might just be a fucking California thing. Welcome to civilisation. Try to avoid fornicating with cows, it’s generally frowned upon.”

“Yeah?”

“Shocking, I know.” Brad doesn’t bother smoothing out the bite in his tone. The good thing about Ray is that with him, Brad doesn’t have to. He stretches, a long process of unspooling stiff muscle, and bends his neck until he hears the crack of realigning vertebrae. Ray watches him shift into a more comfortable position, until they’re face to face, and he looks like he’s tense enough to buzz right out of his skin.

Brad gestures at him to go on. “But you were saying something about all the strange and nasty you’ve been getting.”

Ray swallows, a man out in deep water unwilling to sink without putting up a hell of a fight. Brad doesn’t know how to tell him he doesn’t have to fight, unless he wants to, and even then Brad could take his skinny ass and break him in fucking half.

“Okay. Shit. Hold your damn horses.” Ray puts up his hand, palm open. It’s an odd thing, the forced proximity of sharing a tent: he almost ends up poking Brad in the chest, and his fingers twitch as if it’s a struggle to keep them from clenching in Brad’s thermal shirt. Boom, Brad thinks. Headshot. “Cards on the table. I’ve got no fucking clue what you want from me right now.”

“Ray.” It’s like twenty thousand volts to the nervous system, seeing the way Ray’s throat works at the sound of his own name on Brad’s tongue, like it’s the first time he’s ever really said it.

Brad feels like he’s about to dive, suspended in the split second of weightlessness before bradycardia kicks in. He grabs Ray’s wrist and twists, hard; Ray lands mostly flat on his back, opposite shoulder taking most of his weight, breath escaping in a strangled hiss. Brad straddles his hips. No way to mistake Ray’s interest, there; it shouldn’t be surprising that he likes getting pushed around a little.

“We’re stuck on top of a fucking mountain.” Brad leans forward, catching himself on his hands where they bracket Ray’s neck. Ray stares up at him mutely, but Brad is willing to give him some leeway on account of the thin air. Shifting his weight to one hand, he reaches down with the other to undo Ray’s pants. “I’ve had to listen to your pathetic attempts at jerking off every goddamn night, sometimes twice a night. You could at least provide me with some fucking entertainment. Compensation. Six of one, take your pick.”

Ray bucks under him, but when Brad moves to get off, lean back, he ends up with his hand in a grip so tight the bones grind together, even if Ray can’t fully circle his wrist between thumb and middle finger.

“If I’d known you were counting my jacks I would’ve made more of an artistic fucking effort,” Ray says, and shoves Brad’s hand down his pants.

“Really.”

“Really, I didn’t know I was being graded on my — fucking — performance.” He draws the word out, a long exhale over the vowels, like this isn’t a dry handjob with Brad crushing his legs with his weight but the best fuck he’s ever had, and he needs to steady his breathing to savour it.

“You’ll know better next time.” Brad doesn’t even listen to what he’s saying; he just wants to keep Ray talking. He doesn’t know why.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll put it in my secret journal, c’mon, harder, _fuck_.”

He makes a noise of pure outrage when Brad gets his hand off his cock, like Brad just killed his puppy. Brad thinks about licking his palm just to see if the visual would be enough to make Ray come, all that leftover barely-not-a-teenager stamina.

“You goddamn cocktease,” Ray whines. “Typical NCO behaviour, homes. No commitment. Would I jerk you around by the dick? Literally? No, I wouldn’t.”

“Are you trying to dare me into blowing you, Ray?”

“I don’t know. Is it working?”

Brad looks at him, expressionless.

“Double dog dare,” Ray coaxes, and wiggles his hips hard enough that Brad needs to catch himself or lose his balance.

Nothing else to do, really. Brad pats the center of Ray’s chest, says, “Keep it down or I’ll gag you,” and slides down Ray’s body to kneel in the spread of his thighs and get the closest thing to a comfortable angle as he’ll be able to, bending down.

“Hey, you could do that, I don’t know, that’d be kinda hot,” Ray says, breathless, and then just keeps talking absolute nonsense about what he’d like to do next time — and even breathless and panting he sounds so fucking certain that there will be a next time — how it’s going to be his mouth on Brad’s dick because he is just that generous, and he’s thought about it enough times to fuel a small rocket, besides. Brad wonders who will run out of air first, he or Ray.

He ends up beating Ray by a full minute, gets Ray’s nails digging into his scalp when his hair proves too short for Ray to grab hold of, and sucks him off the rest of the way in near silence. He doesn’t swallow, because he doesn’t fucking swallow. Ray looks at him like he’s an early Christmas present, regardless.

-

**September, 2006**

There are rules. Brad never actually spells any of them out, partly because of what Ray has always suspected is some kind of brain implant that electrocutes him any time he expresses an emotion, which used to be about as hilarious to joke about as Ray’s conviction that Brad’s parents kept him locked up in a cupboard only to let him out on Yom Kippur all charged and programmed and ready to hide his wires and antennas, pretend to be a real live boy and not a natural born stone cold killer. A dweeb, but a killer nonetheless: Ray’s got firsthand experience.

So it used to be funny, but since then Ray’s also gotten some glorious, sticky, wet-panted firsthand experience of death by electrocution. He hasn’t let Brad throw a toaster into a bathtub with Ray in it. Even a simultaneous blowjob probably wouldn’t make that appealing, and that is saying something, considering Ray also has firsthand experience getting sucked off underwater. Wonderful thing, breath control.

Actually, the thing with the emotion-repressing brain implant? Still goddamn funny.

The other reason Brad doesn’t spell out any ground rules is that it would make it easier for Ray to trample all over them. Sure, he’s big on direct orders, like, “Don’t bleed on my bed, Ray,” or, “You pissed on my lawn, Ray, don’t piss on my lawn,” and sometimes, horribly, “I won’t have time to get groceries after work, get some food before we both fucking starve.”

Ray is more or less okay with direct orders, when they align with his preexisting plans.

So as soon as he’s back from delivering the incriminating polaroids to Fuck You, having dangled like a loon from a third-story fire escape getting good angles on one Mrs Huang bumping uglies with her tragically forlorn husband’s best friend, he gets the sushi knife. It’s the wicked sharp one, from Brad’s good set. It’ll do. Ray walks out of the kitchen, humming in a brain-splitting falsetto, “—it’s not gonna happen, ooh, ‘cause I ain’t no hollaback girl, no I ain’t no hollaback girl—”

Brad, sadness and woe and early onset midlife crisis personified, is watching some British export car show, planted on Ray’s couch like a warm invitation. The fucking limbs on that man. His ankles are falling off the armrest.

Ray tucks the knife into the back of his pants, smart-like, between jeans and briefs to avoid skin. He might be cruising Crazytown, CA on the regular and getting lucky with whatever fairies fly out of absinthe when you shake it, but he’s not stupid. If he actually approached Brad with a knife, he’d get stabbed through the brain before he could speak J.Lo’s name in vain, and he’s fast if he has to be, but he’s not fast enough to time an orgasm to Brad’s freakish reflexes. He doesn’t have a stopwatch.

He should get a stopwatch.

He vaults over the back of the couch and scores a two-point landing across Brad’s lap, one knee sinking into the upholstery and the other connecting with Brad’s hip hard enough that Ray’s teeth clatter. The crowd goes wild. Brad would have to be in the midst of a perception-altering seizure to miss Ray coming in, but just in case, “Honey. I’m home,” Ray announces in the most disgustingly sugary tone he can muster.

Brad looks up at him. Ray will get tired of Brad in a position where he has to look up at him in approximately never. “Get out of my face before I rearrange yours, however many times it takes before it stays that way,” says Brad, very calmly, but he’s reaching for the remote to mute the TV even as he talks.

“You’re squatting on my couch,” Ray informs him, leaning his weight a little heavier on Brad’s hips, trying to gauge potential interest. Maybe. Hard to tell, with so many layers of fabric between them. _Hard._ Oh, Ray cracks himself up.

“Squatting on _your_ — I can’t even respond to this. Do you hear half the shit that comes out of your mouth?”

“Hey, you know I just talk to piss you off enough you shut me up.” It’s totally not grinding if there’s no shitty teenage-desperation music. Ray does it again, shifting around less for comfort and more for funsies. “With your big, hard — ow, dude, what the fuck?”

“Followup question.” Brad knocks his fist against Ray’s jaw again, lighter this time, and this time Ray doesn’t bite down on his own tongue. “Do you daydream about my cock 24/7, or is that more of a part time occupation?”

Ray scowls down at him. “Yeah, it’s part time, I only do it when I’m not busy fucking your mom.”

He moves to stand, get up and leave and do something more interesting with someone less reticent, but before he can get a solid foothold to give Brad the kick in the nuts he so achingly needs, Brad grabs him. His hand closes around the back of Ray’s neck, and it’s sort of amazing, after barely half a year, that Ray’s lizard brain has learned to let that touch guide him anywhere Brad wants him. But that’s just him: it’s not any kind of imperative he has to follow or die, and die, and then die all over again, in new and ever more imaginative ways.

Brad’s fingers curl into the soft flesh of his neck. “I didn’t say I wanted you to leave.”

Ray has to brace himself with one hand over Brad’s collarbone, infinitely breakable but as warm as the rest of him. If Ray moved his hand, three and a half inches, tops, he would feel the pound of blood as it courses, fever-fast, through Brad’s artery. His throat seems naked, unbruised. Ray bites his tongue. He wants to say something, but Brad’s eyes look flat in artificial evening light, all widened pupils, and Ray forgets all about it.

“Yeah?” he asks. This is what no ground rules comes down to: questions like these get solved in as few words as possible.

The corner of Brad’s mouth lifts. “Sure.”

That’s about the amount of talking Ray can stomach, when Brad tastes like beer and takeout, and tightens his hand at the back of Ray’s neck at nothing more dramatic than Ray biting down on his lower lip, and then his tongue. Ray draws blood, inhales the faint metallic tang of it, and rolls his hips to distract Brad from the makeout equivalent of a papercut.

Brad’s hand drifts to his ass, which is a fantastic direction that Ray approves of wholeheartedly. Then he stops. “Ray.”

Ray can see the contraction of his pupils. Busted, he thinks, and wonders if it would be worth it to play dumb. _Oh, officer, was I really going a hundred and twenty?_ Brad would ask if that is a knife in Ray’s pocket, and Ray would bemoan his lack of faith: maybe I’m just happy to see you, ever thought of that? And then Brad would braid his hair and they’d cuddle, listening to the gentle croon of smooth jazz on the stereo. Ray starts laughing, most of it going up his nose in a donkey snort.

“ _Ray._ ”

“Don’t play Cassandra Wilson at my funeral, Brad, you gotta promise me. Fucking pinky swear this shit right now.”

Instead of promising anything, Brad twists around, fucking catlike when he wants to be. He wrap his legs around Ray’s waist and throws him, right off the edge of the couch and down to the floor. They land with a hollow groan of floorboards, the knife poking Ray’s upper thigh before Brad pulls it out from under him. He flips it into reverse grip, just how they’ve been taught to maximise pressure and ease of tearing through muscle, and Ray loses his entire train of thought, choked-back laughter dying on his lips as his breathing evens out into something shallow and anticipatory and tinged with red.

Brad tucks the edge of the knife under the hem of Ray’s t-shirt, cold steel a sharp prickle on the too-warm skin of Ray’s abdomen, and cuts through the fabric like it’s butter. The blade slides sideways, across Ray’s collarbone. If Ray had autopsy scars, Brad would retrace them. Zero to ready to go: he’s so hard there are dark spots at the edges of his vision, from how all his fucking blood has rushed south.

Brad balances the tip of the knife on Ray’s collarbone, then moves it lower, to the side, to the stretch of skin between Ray’s ribcage and shoulder. It doesn’t nick him. Ray wraps his fingers around the blade and pulls it into his shoulder, hand slipping in his own blood.

“Jesus christ,” Brad says, a shaky exhale, but he doesn’t pull back. He stays still, transfixed by the sight of the blade slipping into pliant flesh and muscle. Ray knew the sushi knife would be a great choice.

“Nope, just little ol’ me. C’mon, Bradley, before I die of waiting.”

It doesn’t even hurt, not like something blunt would have hurt. Brad’s hand is so pale as to be white, next to all that red, and his face has gone pallid, as though he’s the one bleeding. He inhales through his nose, exhales through his mouth, and finally undoes Ray’s pants to get at least one hand around his dick. Ray can barely feel the touch, sensation fading into the white noise of rising tide.

The knife pushes through the meat of his shoulder, scraping against bone, to come out on the other side with an obscene wet noise. It thunks softly into the ground, scratching wood each time Ray so much as twitches, and it’s hard to stay still. Brad is working him with one hand, the other unmoving on the knife handle, and then the tip of the blade lodges in a crack between the boards and Ray can’t move without sawing through his arm.

He tips his head back, mouth falling open on an exhale, only for Brad to lean down and pull Ray’s breath into his own lungs. The blood still on Brad’s lips tastes cleaner, somehow. Blindly, Ray tries to reach down between their bodies with the hand that still has circulation and connected nerves, but Brad knocks it away with one elbow. Doesn’t even stop jerking Ray off.

Ray isn’t going to beg, so he lets Brad kiss him, lets the pool of red spread around them, lets his body seize, growing weak from blood loss, lets the smell of iron and sweat and Brad’s aftershave wash over him, and sees stars when he comes.

Brad has to brace himself on one knee to pull the knife out of the floor, then out of Ray’s shoulder, as slow as any agony worth its name. He watches Ray all the while, eyes too wide and breath shaky from adrenaline and the kind of primeval fear of death even Ray remembers, sometimes, lurking at the edges of his bravado.

He pushes Brad away with his one good hand until his back hits the couch, and Brad lets him. In moments like this, Ray thinks Brad would let him do anything.

It’s an ungainly sprawl that lands him between Brad’s open thighs, and the whole left side of Ray’s body feels numb, arm and most of his chest covered in blood, but it’s not rocket science to get Brad’s dick out of his pants one-handed. Ray manages just fine. Brad tries to keep his fists clenched in the couch upholstery, but it’s a losing battle once Ray swallows him down. Ray pushes up into the fingers carding through his hair. Do something mildly weird or screwed up in bed and Brad gets so fucking gentle. Ray doesn’t remember when he learned to bear it.

He lies with his head on Brad’s thigh, after, drifting for half an hour while Brad fills the silence with the drone of televised static. Ray laughs quietly to himself and pats Brad’s knee, dislodging the TV remote from where it’s balanced on Brad’s leg.

“Hey,” he says, too quiet to sound real, but for the time being his neurons have slowed down enough that he can actually and unashamedly enjoy lying on the floor with Brad in post-orgasmic chill, “don’t, like, get your ovaries in a twist or anything, but that was seriously fucking gay.”

Brad snorts. He doesn’t say anything, but puts his hand over Ray’s mouth, thumb warm and dry over Ray’s cheekbone.

Once the wound has closed and the blood coating Ray’s skin starts to flake, peeling and cracking like sunburn, Ray lets Brad hustle them both into the shower, and only puts up a token fight when Brad washes the blood off him with the care of someone severely allergic trying to bathe a mud-streaked stray dog.

-

“Yo, Staff. We’re gonna be throwing Gabe’s paddle party next Friday,” Lee says as he parks his ass on Brad’s desk, unmindful of the paperwork. “That good for you?”

Brad gives it some thought, like his social calendar is already bursting at the seams. “Yeah, probably. So he didn’t re-up?”

Lee shakes his head, shoulders slumping. “Wasn’t going to after his second tour in Afghanistan. Whatever, man. Can’t keep them all, right?”

Can’t keep most of them, Brad thinks, uncomfortably aware of the Corps’ shitty turnover rate. He can’t remember offhand if it’s the highest among the other branches, but it wouldn’t surprise him. Some people can’t take it. He has always thought it’s better to let them wash out early, before they get that look about them, the quiet dead-eyed apathy of men who know the civilian world has nothing better to offer them than the perfect storm of structure and bullshit guaranteed by service in the military. Brad can’t even begin to conceptualise not being able to take it. What the fuck else would he do?

He says, “Yeah. His loss. Keep me posted, all right? He was on my team in Iraq. I should be there, make sure he doesn’t drown himself in a pool of his own fucking tears.”

“Sure, Brad, you got it. Oh, there’s something else.”

The most ominous words in the English language, other than _We need to talk_ or _There’s something I need to tell you_. Brad raises his eyebrows, waiting for the shoe to drop. Since that first time, he’s made sure to avoid above-the-collar bruises; he doesn’t get looks, this way, and no gossiping, overinvested marines stare at him like they’re just waiting to hand him some helpful and informative pamphlets. Still, he finds himself itching to touch his throat, feel the long-gone phantom ache.

“I just talked to Gunny.” Lee looks at Brad’s desk, not at Brad. The line of his shoulders is a cross between tense and deflated, and Brad knows what he’s about to say in the split second before Lee says it: “Word is we’ll be getting our orders today or tomorrow, ship out before October’s through.”

“Right.” Brad keeps his expression placid, unwilling to let the sudden spike in his heart rate show. It’s just a deployment. It’s his job. “I guess I better start making sure all you reprobate fuckups have your paperwork in order.”

“I doubt there’s gonna be another clusterfuck like the requalification thing before Afghanistan, but hey, better safe than sorry.”

“That’s helpful, Sergeant.” When Lee shows no intention of leaving, Brad sighs. “Well? Do you do anything around here, or are you planning to spend the rest of your fucking day bothering those of us with actual jobs?”

Lee grins, and knocks his fist into Brad’s shoulder on his way out. He lands the punch at the centre of a bruise Brad almost forgot about, one left by Ray’s bony elbow where he leaned his weight on it. Brad has complementary carpet burn all over his ass and shoulder blade, and it’s a struggle not to rub at his forehead, right in the middle, where Ray smacked him with come-sticky fingers and, as Brad tried and failed to find a compromise between laughing and gagging, admonished Brad for ruining his sexy Lion King christening fantasy. All without first getting off Brad’s dick, but if there is one thing Brad is willing to hand Ray, it’s that he is truly gifted in the art of multitasking, as long as one of the tasks includes fucking.

The memory is enough to give him pause, and he spends a humiliating and completely unacceptable two minutes asking himself what shipping out will mean for Ray, or them, or something, like a wilting goddamn Army wife. His shipping out won’t mean anything for either of them, just like Brad leaving for work five days a week doesn’t mean anything for either of them. He’s not that guy.

He’s the guy who is going to watch others start the arduous process of pre-deployment checklist box-ticking, _How to Prepare Yourself and Your Marine for His or Her Deployment_ , spouse and family seminars and all the other useless pontificating that does little but compromise combat readiness in a flurry of masturbatory emotional oversharing. Ray isn’t his to worry about.

Except.

It isn’t spontaneity or impulse that makes Brad open a new browser window in incognito mode and start searching for any USMC statutes regarding reenlistment procedures for late-manifesting, previously unregistered metahumans. It isn’t that: he’s had that thought before, or something akin to it, maybe a little less defined into an actual shape, actual words. Ray seems content to spend the rest of his waking afterlife camped out on Brad’s couch, fucking Brad any chance he gets that isn’t already spent pissing him off, or enacting petty vigilante justice on behalf of people who are willing to pay not to get their hands dirty.

He might have done some good, setting fire to a drug stash here and there, making sure some creep is too terrified to ever come within five miles of a primary school again, but it’s not sustainable. It’s no way to spend an eternity, but by now, there has to be a part of Ray’s five-year plan that is predicated on Brad’s willingness to indulge him indefinitely.

The problem is that the waiting game is starting to get under Brad’s skin: a constant low-level tension as he waits for yet another axe to fall. It has been made manifest and painfully obvious in a shitty house in a shitty neighbourhood, while he rooted for hidden cash in some scumbag civilian’s couch and then crushed his larynx, because — he looked at Ray wrong. Unsustainable, not in the long run.

If Brad is shipping out, he might as well make the most of it.

It might be good for Ray, to try something else. Worth it, too, to have him at Brad’s nine again. Him, not whatever came back from that compound in Afghanistan wearing Ray’s skin. Maybe there’d be too much red tape to get him for this deployment, but he could requalify in less than a year. In time for the one after, or the next; there’s never going to be a shortage of wars.

Brad drives home with no incriminating paperwork, and having printed none of his cursory research. No official word came down for the rest of the day, much less orders. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week.

There’s time.

The house isn’t quiet when Brad gets there. It feels lived-in these days, having finally lost that distinct smell of staleness and old air fresheners his sister puts all over the place any time she swings by to water the plants. Funnily enough, he always gets to the point of feeling at home just when he knows he’s due to leave again. Rinse, repeat, never enough to get used to any one thing. Familiarity is a fair price to pay for staying sharp.

Leaving his keys by the door, Brad toes off his boots and decides not to change out of uniform until he sees what manner of harebrained mayhem Ray has unleashed. It doesn’t take long: he finds Ray in the kitchen, and a cursory glance doesn’t uncover knee-deep pools of fresh blood anywhere. Brad stops in the doorway and stares, conscious that he’s trying to commit something transient to memory; but no one will know, and no one will be the wiser.

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that Ray is whatever he is now, familiar and alien all at once, impossible to predict or measure, to pin down. Sometimes, he makes it easy, through no effort of his own. Sometimes Brad will catch him unawares and watch, feeling like an uninvited voyeur, though not enough to stop.

Ray is too busy to notice him, anyway, stuffing his face with stale-looking poptarts straight from the foil packets. He’s sat on the kitchen counter with one foot in the sink and the other hanging off to the side, in one of Brad’s old PT shirts. The sleeves are rolled up, the edges of Ray’s ink peeking out where he still has it, most of his tattoos fallen victim to tissue regeneration. It still makes Brad want to hit something until it dies, or do something completely fucking girlishly retarded, like get a tattoo for each one that Ray’s lost.

Ray’s hair is too long to be regulation, grown out from the uneven buzzcut he sported when he first showed up, but still too short to pass for a civilian. Caught like a messed up, wiry bug in the viscous no man’s land of out-of-the-Corps, not-back-to-the-real-world-yet. Still salvageable.

Looking at him like that Brad can push away the doubt gnawing at him from the inside, and the sense memory of holding Ray underwater until his lungs gave out, the equally vivid sense memory of Ray holding him down in return, though not nearly long enough to cause permanent damage. Brad can put it all aside. For a moment, he can just live, right here, in the present.

“If you put your foot down the garbage disposal, I’m throwing you out,” he says.

Ray doesn’t look away from where he’s attempting to perform oral on a poptart. “You had your chance and blew it, homes, there’s no saving your reputation.”

It’s as if his brain comes online halfway through the sentence, and Ray shakes off whatever sleepless doze he was in, mouth going on automatic. His eyes get sharper, and he hops off the counter, throws the remains of his food in the sink. Brad wants to tell him he looks like a poster boy for special needs kids, in a too-big shirt and no pants, no socks, with cinnamon all over his face because he learned manners and social cues from a wild pack of hyenas.

Brad grins at him. He’s already bracing himself when Ray makes a move in his direction. “You know how it goes, Ray. I don’t give a damn about my reputation.”

The sound Ray lets out is the kind of hawkish, jarring cackle that makes the hair at the back of Brad’s neck stand on end. He’s ready for Ray to jump him, four flailing uncoordinated limbs, thighs clamped around Brad’s waist like bony vises. He’s ready for it in the same way someone might be ready for an incoming hurricane or forest fire: with resigned acceptance of the inevitable. Ray is heavy, for a skinny runt.

“You fucking spidermonkey,” Brad manages, staggering back under the weight. He locks his knees and the wall cushions his backwards momentum.

“Dude, don’t ruin it, Joan Jett gets you, like, two blowjobs to be traded in at your convenience and a shower quickie, if you’re up for it.” Ray grinds down, pushing Brad harder into the wall. “Oh, yeah, you’re up for it. Let’s go.”

There are too many tactical missteps along the way for a quick fuck in the shower to work, and later Brad is absolutely going to regret the framed photo that ends up on the floor and cracked, not to mention the unspeakable defilement of his uniform. But he still ends up on his knees in the bathroom, with Ray scratching his scalp as he scrambles for purchase in too-short hair, with an ache in his jaw he’s going to feel the next day at work; and later, with his uniform pants around his ankles and Ray braced against the sink, breathless laughter and slap of skin bouncing off the tiled walls.

Of all the things Brad could get used to with minimal effort — already has, maybe — here’s one.

In a couple months they’re both going to be gone, anyway.

-

**October, 2006**

Ray is coming out of a basement on the north side of town at about three in the morning when he spots him: black suit, grey tie, tasteful shirt that screams ‘government agent, you can trust me,’ the eternal paradox of the government-suit-type dress code. In short, he looks exactly the same as last time Ray saw him, when they’d met in some office in the early morning and Ray had signed his life away.

He should have guessed that anyone who makes a business of recruiting post-exit bottle cases would still be hanging around the bases in a Navy town. Murtaugh doesn’t see him, but it’s not like he’s looking. As far as Ray knows, his only job is to recruit; the rest comes after, with different hands. If he knows what happens to people after he seals the deal, it’s not likely he’d expect to see them hanging around in California. Ray would bet all six of his molars that Murtaugh if-that-even- _is_ -your-real-name never sees the results of his work beyond a pay packet and a sense of job satisfaction.

Suddenly the petty thrill of having slammed some guy’s nuts in a drawer once or twice for doing something unspeakable to someone’s car seems distant, all of his focus drawn to the shape of a new target. Ray’s memories of being human, unaltered, all terminate here, with this doughy ass wrapped lovingly in expensive pants. All change, please, the train’s reached its final stop.

The dim pink neon glow of the bar Murtaugh is exiting spills across the wet pavement. It hasn’t rained in months, so it’s probably not a promising sign that the concrete looks damp, but the light catches it regardless of the source of its reflective quality. Murtaugh is on the phone, looking over the roof of the car for an instant before he gets in. The engine’s running, so there’s a driver, someone whose job it is to ferry him around the parts of town where people like Ray congregate. People like Ray used to be, anyway. Maybe there’s an argument to be made that he’s still a person like that, but semantics aren’t really the hill Ray (Person) wishes to die on. If he could, obviously.

Over the last few months, Ray has devoted some thought to how that might work. Obviously decapitation is out of the question. That one is asked and answered. Thanks, Brad. Maybe fire, but only if the ashes were scattered? Maybe something thermonuclear, but then again, Ray’s already a mutant, so what radiation would do to him is anyone’s guess. He could always devote himself to a second career as a lab rat.

Ray swallows, watching the car drive away. He’s memorised the plate by rote, because if he’s not good at being dead he might as well be decent at living revenge.

The temptation is to serve it hot. He could run after the car, rip through the roof until his hands were bloody stumps and beat Murtaugh to death with what’s left, but Ray’s also got recon training kicking around somewhere in the back of his mind where the missing teeth rattle sometimes. Cold is better. Cold is something Ray would quite like to inflict.

He watches until the car is out of sight before he fires up his own ride, driving the long way back to the house. He’s got eight hundred dollars to collect, so he makes a stop at the bar, collects his cash and stops for coffee. It sort of happens in a daze, but that’s fine, a daze is nice sometimes. Comforting, soft-edged, like there’s vaseline on the camera lens. He dumps a handful of sugar packets in his and leaves Brad’s black, sure that he’s going to sweeten it on the down-low like he thinks Ray can’t see him going for the sugar bowl above the toaster. Asshole.

Sure enough, Brad runs in the door a few minutes after Ray, sweating and reddish around the cheekbones. Ray takes the opportunity to slam him against the fridge and lick his neck, mostly because it takes Brad a minute or so to remember he doesn’t like that and shove him off. Ray holds his coffee just out of his reach as a protest measure.

“Just give me the fucking coffee,” Brad mutters, making a grab for it.

Ray dances back a little, holding it in his fingertips. “Come on, Brad. You’ll have to try a little harder. I know you’re neolithic before caffeine, but—”

Brad reaches into his space, crowding him into the countertop until it digs into the small of Ray’s back, right-angles just sharp enough to register. “That’s you, Ray. You keep getting us confused like this, I’ll have to start labelling your shirts.” He plucks the coffee out of Ray’s grip, then, disappointingly, retreats to drink it. Ray, finding himself impatient, starts drumming a pattern on the front of his thigh, wondering which drawer is housing the most interesting kitchen implements Brad could be persuaded to use. Corkscrew? That might linger for a while.

Brad looks somewhat green under the fading flush. “At the risk of getting an answer, what’s gotten into you?”

Ray must have said that last part out loud. He should really pay more attention to that. “Nothing, at this rate. Come on, drink your coffee, unless you’re doing this to torture me, but I gotta say, this isn’t the fun kind.”

Brad sets his coffee aside. “I’m not sticking a corkscrew in you. What crawled into your brain and nested there? This is like when you first—” Brad cuts himself off, narrowing his eyes. “Stop it.”

Ray isn’t really aware that he’s doing anything. Maybe it’s the tapping. Maybe it’s the nail he’s chewing off. That used to pass the time between bouts of screaming and violating all the laws of warfare. Possibly the laws of nature, considering Ray’s only a mutant because he let someone make him one. Ah, fuck it, he wasn’t going to let that ruin his morning. He makes a show of putting his fingernail back on, but a new one is already growing out, so mostly it’s just bloody pulp destined for the sink.

He tosses it in there and finishes his coffee in a long gulp. “You’re really pussying out here, Brad. What red-blooded American male turns down morning sex? You’re giving us a bad name. Do it for America, come on.”

Brad crosses his arms and does that thing where he looms without actually moving. It makes Ray want to kick him out at the knees, suddenly rigidly uncomfortable.

“America’s got bigger problems,” Brad says, only barely a comeback. Ray’s ashamed for him, truly. “And you look like shit.”

“You really know how to drop a girl’s pants, Iceman.” Ray crushes the coffee cup and lunges for him, mostly because he wants to throw a little shock up there, just to erase the unbearable look of stoic responsibility Brad adopts when he thinks he’s about to do a good deed. Motherfucker.

Brad fends him off, wrestling him back with both of his gigantic hands wrapped firmly around Ray’s biceps. If he doesn’t let go Ray is going to break his fingers off one by one, and that won’t be fun for either of them. “If you don’t let me go, I’m going to break your fingers off one by one, and that won’t be fun for either of us.” Ha, he said it out loud.

Brad lets him go, and a tiny, shrieking part of Ray is disappointed.

“Unfuck yourself,” Brad says, pulling back to an arm’s length of distance.

Ray used to think that seeing red was a euphemism for having your balls so far up your own ass they took residence in your brain, and the subsequent ragefit was only a product of excess testosterone leaking around the grey matter. Then he got smacked in the eyes enough times to realise it’s just the feeling you get when there’s so much blood in your eyeballs you can’t fucking see straight, and hell if that wasn’t something of a revelation. Turns out that feeling’s not exclusive to eye injuries. Neat. “Say that again.”

“Unfuck yourself, Ray,” Brad enunciates, private school vowels coming out all round and deliberate. “I don’t have time to distract you this morning.”

Ray may or may not be entirely responsible for what happens next, but it definitely ends with Brad facedown on the floor of his kitchen, kind of like déjà vu, except Ray knows he’s done this before, but that time Brad hadn’t really fought him. This time, he makes as solid an effort to throw Ray off as a guy who can’t afford to lose a few vital joints can possibly manage, and ends up with one of Ray’s hands clamped over his mouth. Unlucky for him, Ray is utterly heedless of the grind of his teeth into the muscle. “One more time? I don’t think I fucking heard you.”

Brad bites harder, panic beginning to settle around his eyes. Maybe, if Ray hangs on just a little longer, Brad will snap and kill him again, just roll him over and —

Ray scrambles back, leaving a chunk of his palm behind. The pain pulls him back down a little, just enough to remember that it fucking sucks, getting his neck snapped. It sucks about as much as always knowing, just before everything goes dark, that it’ll never be the last time.

The slap of skin hitting the floor is all the warning Ray gets before Brad rolls onto his side and starts dragging in heaving breaths, one hand braced on the linoleum like he can’t quite push himself upright yet. Shit, this is all too much for an early morning. Brad’s making a sound like he’s about to puke, and Ray can’t stay in the kitchen a second longer. He doesn’t even say anything on his way out, which is probably for the best, though not in any way a guarantee of a good exit. Somehow he finds himself in the car, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Fuck it, he’s got money. He might as well go back to work.

The drive back to the bar takes less (more?) time than it should. Ray can’t tell, but he also doesn’t really care. The only problem is it’s fucking _closed._ Closed! Who closes a perfectly good dive at six thirty in the morning. It’s an outrage. The only thing left to do is clearly to break in.

Ray’s been in here more times than he can count over the last — shit, five months? Six? Time flies when you’re, well. When you’re immortal, probably. Anyway. He knows the place. He knows the exits. He knows it’d be a piece of cake to climb up on the roof and yank off the skylight, so that’s what he does. He drops down into the main room and lands right on the pool table, which gives an ominous creak. It doesn’t break, thankfully. He likes it, he wouldn’t want to be its murderer.

He’s still thinking about what manner of shenanigans the pool table has seen in its many years of service when a knife lands in his chest, hilt quivering a little as Ray stares at it. “Hey!”

The bartender shrugs, pulling a shotgun out from under the beer kegs. Ray could tell her that’s an appalling breach of firearm safety but he’s just been stabbed at speed. “Why the fuck are you closed?”

She narrows her eyes, lining up a shot and pumping a round in. “Personal reasons. You wanna explain yourself?”

Ray yanks the knife out. It’s short, so he’s not about to die uncomfortably, but fuck, that hurts. “Come on, if I was going to kill you I’d do it better than this. You think I couldn’t just snap your neck in the alley when you’re hauling kegs? Give me at least _some_ credit for not being a complete fucking moron.”

Fuck You looks dubious, watching the stab wound knit itself back together, gush of blood tapering off. “Well, I just lost a bet.”

“What?”

“I had you as a Seal who got bounced. Looks like whoever had metahuman wins a beer.”

Ray bursts out laughing. It probably doesn’t sound good, but fuck, it feels better. “All this time and you didn’t know? I’m offended, and deeply ashamed on your behalf. For someone with such good reflexes, your observational skills are for shit.”

“You gonna climb down anytime soon?”

Oh, right, Ray is still on the pool table. He clambers down so he’s just sitting on the edge of it, waiting for the shotgun to dip. When it finally does, Ray rolls his shoulders, ribs popping a little as one or two resettle. “Hey, I need a favour. Personal project.”

“What makes you think I’ll do you any personal favours?” She unloads carefully, keeping Ray where she can see him.

Ray smiles at her.

“Point taken. What can I do for you?”

Ray rattles off the plate number that’s been kicking around in his head for hours. It’s still just right there, neon-lit and stark, just below Murtaugh’s fucking face, and the sound Brad had made when Ray had tackled him. “Can you find out an address for that?”

“Your cop can’t do that for you?”

Ray swallows the laugh that wants to come out, making an attempt to stop thinking about the wet gasp, or the slap of a palm on linoleum, or the horribly tempting feeling of holding an arm just close to breaking. “He’s not a fan of extracurriculars,” Ray explains, sure that he’s got something in his throat. Maybe it’s the laugh solidifying. Maybe it’s an old bullet from somewhere. Either way, it’ll fade.

Fuck You nods, something weird going on on her face, but Ray doesn’t care to unpick it. “It’ll take a few hours.”

Ray doesn’t even try to hold in what’s trying to come out. “I’ve got nothing but time.” Maybe it’s a laugh. It sure sounds like one. “I’m keeping this!” Ray yells at her back, pocketing the knife. It’s a perfectly good knife. He might need it. He tosses it end over end, testing the balance. Finally, he makes a game of it, seeing how many times he can get it to stick in the ceiling. Ray’s up to seven hundred when Fuck You comes back, hanging up a phone and writing on a scrap of paper. The knife clatters to the floor a few inches from Ray’s left foot.

“This is in LA,” she says, tossing the scrap on the bar.

Ray swipes it, looking at the address. It’s easily memorised. He’s got practice. “Thanks. I owe you one.”

“Damn right.” Fuck You squints at Ray for a second with her mouth open, as though she’s about to say something then thinks better of it. “You gonna sleep anytime soon?”

Ray shrugs, deliberately not thinking of jolting awake convinced the tangle of a blanket was straps across his chest, or that the press of Brad’s arm on the back of his neck was something else. Even the familiarity of the couch doesn’t seem appealing now, couched (ha) as it is in weird half-remembered dreamscapes. “Nah.”

“Then let me take this opportunity to tell you that if you ever break into my bar again I will shoot you.”

Ray shrugs. “If it makes you feel better,” he announces magnanimously. “I can give you all the shot back after, save on cartridges.”

“Get out.”

Ray does.

The drive to LA takes fuckingforever. Ray amuses himself by singing along to the radio, but the third time someone starts wailing about saving horses by riding cowboys Ray turns the music off. He’s stuck on the freeway for another hour. By the time he sees the exit he’s looking for he’s jittery behind the wheel, itching just to ditch the car and run the rest of the way, burn some of it off with the early afternoon sun and the heat of the asphalt under his boots. Suddenly, he aches for a motorcycle, a split-second flash of unreasonable desire that’s gone as soon as it comes, just as the hint of wind through the window dies.

Ray’s about to start just driving over the verge when he sees the sign for the suburb he’s after. It turns out to be pleasant and leafy, the kind of place people probably have families and shit. The kind of place Brad might have grown up, all regular lawns and not a car up on blocks in sight.

The house is the third one from the end of the street, and by the time Ray parks down the block he’s nearly vibrating, lack of sleep and lack of mortality some kind of supercharged jolt that leaves him twitching out of his skin. This is as far as a bar on the wrong side of the base in a shitty part of town could possibly be, except for maybe back in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or the Arctic. All four are alien territories, the manicured suburbia of greater LA stinging him just as badly. He imagines Murtaugh sitting in his breakfast nook with a newspaper, divorced from and above the grime of his job. Ray wants to grind him right back into it, show him the results.

No time like the present. He breaks in through the french patio doors at the back, shards of glass threading out of his skin even before he swings them shut behind him. There isn’t even an alarm. He waits for the sound of panic but doesn’t hear anything, just the faint hum of the piping; shit, it’s mid afternoon by now, the asshole must be getting ready for work.

Ray makes himself a sandwich. At this stage, he feels he’s entitled. He’s just quartering it with his new knife when Murtaugh comes downstairs in a robe. Against white, he looks even paler. A sort of doughy greyness suffusing his indistinct features. He looks a little like a child’s attempt at sculpting a bulldog out of playdough, with slightly less jowl. Ray bites into his sandwich and finds it tastes of nothing. “Hi,” he says, not bothering to swallow. He points at a chair with the knife, his right hand being otherwise occupied at present with pulling lettuce out of his teeth. “Sit down. This’ll only take a second.”

“Mr. Person, I—”

Ray swallows. “I seem to remember you making a point of calling me Corporal, last time. Where’s the respect, Mr. Murtaugh? I don’t see you sitting down.”

Murtaugh hesitates for just enough time for Ray to see it in his eyes. He’s going to run. He fucking runs.

Ray chases him, obviously. He hasn’t driven all this way in civilian fucking traffic to watch the guy who kicked him down this hill in the first place escape into whatever panic room he has socked away under his marble stairs. Ray catches him as he’s scrambling for a phone on the first landing, hands reaching to tap what looks like an intercom just as Ray grabs him by the ankles and yanks. “Really? What if I just want to talk?” Ray grabs him by the hair, sort of wishing there was more of it, to make this easier, making sure Murtaugh is looking at him. “Come on, I could be here for a friendly chat. You like those.”

Trapped halfway up the stairs, Murtaugh has nowhere to go, sprawled into his thick carpeting with Ray kneeling on his chest. Ray remembers he has the knife just in time for Murtaugh to start yelling. Ray only stabs him a little, but it does shut him up, scream tailing off into a pitiful whine as he stares at the knife in his side. Funny, Ray would have thought his blood might look a little different, a little bit greener, maybe viscous? It would have seemed fitting if it was, but nope, it’s just red, staining the white terrycloth bathrobe pink at the edges. Ray looks at it, thinking it’s just like any other blood, and suddenly he feels a little like he’s falling, picture receding until it’s as though he’s watching himself at a distance, Murtaugh starting to struggle as Ray holds him down.

Maybe he says something, but there’s really nothing coming through the white noise whine in his ears. Fuck, Ray could just stab him again, but that won’t skim off the feeling of filth Ray has for having touched him at all, strands of thin hair slipping through his fingers, the soft press of abdomen into the side of his knees, the smell of fear, which isn’t something tangible but has a kind of miasma to it, like something left too long in the sun.

Maybe that’s what Ray smells like now, ozone and decomp, except for how he’ll never —

Murtaugh wriggles out from under him. Ray, on autopilot — sorry folks, technical difficulties — lunges after him, landing so that they both roll down the stairs, and up close it’s even worse: it’s every new facet of hell in a lab in the desert when Ray was still human and dying by degrees, knowing he’d done something unspeakably stupid because some guy in a suit convinced him it would be for something better. It’s everything after, every volt and every bullet, and Ray’s going to be sick.

Murtaugh is yelling again. Ray should never have eaten that sandwich. Nauseated, he yanks the knife out.

He knows he takes the knife with him, but only because by the time he takes his exit off the freeway he’s almost out of gas, the fuel light kicking on just in time for him to pull into the street, and he’s got it wedged in his grip, blade halfway through three of the fingers on his right hand. He barely notices until he tries to slide the gear into park and has to struggle for a grip.

Eventually, he manages. It’s dark out somehow. It’s not the first time he’s lost track of the hours, but it’s the first in long while that he’s missed them.

He doesn’t remember driving home.

-

The next morning, Brad takes the bike to work.

Leaving the house while Ray is still asleep feels like admitting surrender, giving ground where he should stand firm and immovable, but Brad is fit to crawl out of his own skin, and the sheer fucking wrongness of it is enough that he wants out of there.

He doesn’t lose control. He doesn’t let others lose control around him, that volatile spark, pile of dry leaves, ignition and oxygen working for ruin. Maybe Ray defies more than just the laws of nature. Maybe his crazy overrides Brad’s sane.

Last night is still a visceral, untouchable itch trapped under his skin: Ray stumbling into the house past midnight, so quiet his silence took on a presence all of its own, an echoing absence of sound. If Brad was sleeping, it would have woken him, but he wasn’t.

All he could think, seeing Ray with his jaw so tight no words would be able to slip past his clenched teeth even if he wanted them to, all Brad could think of was that stretch of trampled-on grass near Baghdad, the way Rad had slammed into withdrawal hard, mute and poised to tear himself to pieces.

There was blood on his hands last night. These days, it would be a fair guess to assume it was his own, but then he spotted Brad looking, attention catching sluggishly, and shrugged, and said, “It’s not mine,” the end tapering off into a question mark.

He said nothing else from then on, when Brad dragged him to the bathroom and scrubbed the blood off, harsh but eliciting no protest. Ray let himself be manhandled with puppet-like disregard for his own body. His eyes were combat-shock wide, trauma-response wide, and Brad couldn’t swallow past the lump of acid in his throat long enough to ask what he’d done.

So the next morning he takes the bike to work, accelerates on every turn past safety and reason, and once or twice it’s force of will alone that keeps him from careening off the road and into a ditch.

He’s shipping out in less than a month. He has no time for this.

The day passes in a lethargic flurry of pre-deployment activity, a paradox he’s gotten used to by the time his second combat tour rolled around. Brad sorts out two cardboard boxes of requalification paperwork and requisition forms, and shares an agonised and unsympathetic look with Redman when it transpires that half the guys in Alpha need to do a requalification jump; if they manage to squeeze the jump in the month before deployment, Brad privately pledges to eat a parachute, cord and all, then buy Gunny Smith a round of drinks.

It’s not cowardice to avoid going home when he has other things to do, so he fires off a text an hour before he’s due to leave and gets confirmation within ten minutes. He prints out the reenlistment and metahuman registration forms, folds them once, and puts them in his bag.

The bar he drives to is located in a liminal midway point between Oceanside and San Diego, a shitty dive with heart-stopping nachos tucked away off the freeway like a sore. Bryan is already waiting inside, two beers on the table in front of him sweating condensation onto paper napkins. He hasn’t changed at all since Brad has last seen him, and the familiarity is a small comfort.

He gives Brad a long look when he spots him, but Brad’s checked: there are no readily visible bruises above his collar or below his sleeves.

“Don’t know why you can’t just get your STD screening done on base,” Bryan says as a hello. “You hardcore fuckers have got a Navy hospital somewhere in there, right?”

“I’d rather keep this out of general circulation. Besides, the whole battalion is in fucking defcon one getting their physicals and paperwork done. The corpsmen there probably hate us by now.”

“Yeah? You got a departure date?”

“Can’t really say.”

Bryan nods, accepting the evasion with magnanimity. “So what is it, Iceman? I hope you didn’t summon me out of the blue for a consultation about an embarrassing fucking rash.”

“No,” Brad says, and spends three breaths considering how best to breach the topic. In the end, he settles on blunt honesty; he respects Bryan, likes and trusts him, and he wouldn’t appreciate pussyfooting around the issue if their positions were reversed. “I wanted to ask, theoretically, if you knew how metahuman eligibility for active service works these days.”

“These days as opposed to when mutants discovered in the ranks got court-martialled?” Bryan snorts, shakes his head as if to dislodge an unpleasant thought. “If a meta passes physicals like a human would, that’s your eligibility criteria satisfied. As long as the mutation isn’t detrimental to combat effectiveness, it’s fine. Theoretically speaking.” He gives Brad a long, considering look. “When did you manifest? If 1st Recon is due to ship out, you gotta get that shit registered or they’ll bounce you.”

“Not me, I’m fine.” Brad rolls the peeling label on the beer bottle under his thumb. “Trying to parse how much fuckery and red tape there’d be for someone with a freshly manifested meta gene who wanted to re-enlist.”

“A solid fucktruck would be my guess, but with you on it? Doable. Who are we talking about here?”

Brad grins sharply. “Can’t really say.”

He takes Bryan’s scrutiny with what he knows to be unreadable stoicism: he knows, because he’s been perfecting the expression and the posture that necessarily goes with it for years, and there’s only one person, or Person in this case, who can see through the facade. The sobering thought gets caught somewhere in Brad’s throat. He takes a swig of his beer to wash it down, but it just tastes like lukewarm piss.

“Fine,” says Bryan, at long last. “I just hope for your sake you know what you’re doing.”

The truth is that Brad has no idea what he’s doing. What he knows, on a level he can’t name or put a finger on, is that letting Ray run himself into the ground, aimless and fraying at the seams, would be a goatfucked no-go waste. They do say it, don’t they: waste not, want not; simple math. Brad makes meaningless small talk until the beers are finished, and neither he nor Bryan offers to get more.

“Don’t die out there,” Bryan says, out in the parking lot, as Brad is fastening on his bike helmet. “And watch the new kids so they don’t shoot themselves in the fucking faces.”

“You too, Doc. Stay frosty.”

With thought put to tentative action lifting the weight of doubt from Brad’s shoulders, the ride home is the opposite of the morning’s. He still takes dangerous turns, but he does it grinning, leaning over the bike and holding on one-handed with the other outstretched to the side as he rounds a sharp corner and feels the asphalt trying to tear at the thick fabric of his gloves. It’s anxiety he knows, trying not to get turned into roadkill, physical and grounded in reality.

He swings by his favourite Chinese place on his way back, picks up enough beef lo mein and prawn crackers that even Ray’s freakish mutant metabolism won’t complain. It’s only when he parks the bike in his driveway that it occurs to him to wonder if Ray is there at all.

He puts the takeout bags in the kitchen, together with his keys and helmet. Almost offhandedly, he checks the knife drawer. All the utensils are in order, and it leaves Brad with a sense of ease: he lets go of the last of a long-held breath he didn’t realise was trapped in his lungs in the first place.

Ray sits sprawled between armchair and coffee table, one leg bridging the gap and the other curled underneath him, with Brad’s laptop balanced precariously over one thigh. The amiable spread of his limbs seems tethered in exhaustion.

His eyes are ringed with bruises he hasn’t slept off yet, but he’s missing the pallid sheen of cold sweat Brad remembers from last night, the clammy feel of it on his hands when he grabbed Ray by the back of the neck. He doesn’t ask if Ray has slept, or how long, to diffuse the roiling tension he exuded last night from every pore, like a sickness, like gangrene.

He makes himself comfortable on Ray’s couch, kicking his feet up on the table, loose from the wind and the open road and maybe a little bit from the beer. He frowns at the TV: Burt Reynolds is crying like a bitch, broken leg twisted at a harsh angle, and Jon Voight is dragging his moaning pussy ass across the wilderness. It’s disgraceful; they’d never make it in the Corps.

“I really hope you happened to find Deliverance on TCM and this isn’t some shady pay-per-view deal just so you can reconnect with your roots,” Brad says while Jon Voight demonstrates his shitty fucking aim with a crossbow.

Ray snorts. “Sorry, can’t hear you over the righteous indignation of Marjorie dragging Ethel over the coals. That’s some vicious shit, right here.” His voice is lower than what Brad is used to.

Brad looks away from the TV and at Ray, still bent over the laptop, gnawing on a thumbnail as he reads whatever it is he’s reading. Even the nervous tick seems muted, a low-effort version of his usual mix of hyperactive focus and manic energy. Brad hasn’t seen him this subdued since the last leg of the race through Iraq: worn at the edges, skin a little sallow and grin a little strained when he aims it at the laptop screen instead of at Brad.

“Sometimes I wish you’d developed an expensive freak porn addiction,” Brad muses. His foot on the coffee table knocks into Ray’s ankle, and Ray kicks him back half-heartedly but twice as hard. It makes Brad feel inexplicably better.

“ _I’m really really disappointed in you, Ethel, and I see no other option but to make this message board aware of your plagiarism_ — p-l-a-g-e-r-i-s-m, these chummy MILF types sure spell about as well as fucking Casey Kasem — _your plagiarism of the cross-stitch pattern I shared, so I am posting this side-by-side comparison_ , blah blah, all my love, Marjorie, and some…I don’t know what this is, it’s like a smiley face hatefucked a kangaroo.”

“That is so weirdly specific I shudder to think what you did on libo in Australia, Ray.”

Ray kicks him again, and looks up from the laptop, corners of his eyes pulled tight by the smile he’s trying to smother. “Don’t talk trash about Marjorie’s cross-stitch. It’s fucking baller.”

“Knitting circle.” If he grins first, Brad will lose. He bites the inside of his cheek. “You’re stalking an actual, honest to god knitting circle.”

Ray shrugs. “Whatever, man, like marines aren’t sustained by petty schoolyard gossip. Only difference is I get to rubberneck without all the bullshit orders and dead civilians stacked up by the side of the road. You ever get whiplash from that shit?” He swallows, quick and compulsive. “All the fuckups, and we got medals. Some of the shit we did there, if it happened out here—”

Out here, if Brad killed Mikey Greer he’d have gone to prison for murder in the first degree. He wonders if Ray skirted the same precipice last night. All that blood on his hands. Brad wonders if he washed off evidence of a crime, but even now, even mad as a bag of wet cats, Ray is always lucid enough to know who to hurt, and how much, and when to stop. With Brad, he’s stopped every time.

“You’ve been out in the civilian world for too long.” Brad drops his head back to the couch, smirking at the ceiling. If it exposes his throat in some half-realised animal instinct, he’s willing to let it happen. “That is the most homosexual, tree-hugging, Greenpeace-loving pile of liberal bullshit I’ve heard from you yet. Your manhood has atrophied.”

“Motherfucker,” Ray says, fondly exasperated.

It’s the wrong moment, Brad decides, to tell Ray how serious he is.

It’s the wrong moment to tell him about the stack of re-enlistment and mutant registration forms Brad has brought back with him, hope and conviction pulling him along the coast of increasingly familiar waters. He’s earned one last night, with Ray the closest thing to relaxed and clearheaded he’s been in the past week, listening to Ray narrate the knitting message board drama with one ear and the TV with the other.

-

Ray wakes up slowly. Nothing about that on its own is remarkable, except that ever since boot camp Ray’s woken up in one of two ways: abruptly, with a jolt of nerves, or full-out screaming. The screaming part may have started after Afghanistan 2: From Russia With Love, but either way, slowly is new. Maybe it’s the haze of the last few days settling in, a kind of permanent state of disconnect. He can’t tell if he likes it or not, but can’t seem to muster the energy to care. He’s got a kink in his neck from sleeping up against the side of the couch arm, so he rolls off, stretches it out and heads outside for a smoke.

He’s halfway through his third cigarette when Brad slips out the front door in stealth mode, already set to run. “Early bird special?” he asks, glaring at the cigarette butts littering his driveway.

“Hey, some people jog,” Ray says, around the filter clenched in his teeth. “Not like it’s doing me any harm.”

Brad kicks his discards under the car with a long-suffering sigh. The yellow paint is beginning to peel, coming off in sickly flakes, almost green in the dawn light. “Someone’s fucking perky this morning. Sweet dreams of your sister-cousins?”

“Sweet dreams of your grandma,” Ray mutters, throwing the most recent butt right where Brad’s kicked the others away, enjoying the building nicotine buzz.

“I didn’t think I’d have to add necrophilia to your list of psychological deficits, but you constantly surprise me.”

Ray smiles around the butt of his fourth cigarette. Brad rolls his eyes and starts off running, heading down the block at a steady clip. Ray, for no reason he can immediately fathom, takes off after him, boots just about laced tight enough to manage. He matches Brad’s pace, cigarette still lit for a quarter mile before it finally dies, possibly from the force of Brad’s glare as Ray persistently keeps up. Between them is silence but for the rhythmic thud of Ray’s boots and the easy rasp of breath. Halfway, Brad speeds up, trying to outpace him, longer legs eating up the sidewalk, but Ray just keeps up, beginning to smile as Brad turns red.

Ray’s smaller, has to really run to keep up, and Brad is setting an eight minute mile pace, but for a second, he feels he has all the time in the world to spare.

They run the five mile loop around the neighbourhood that Ray thinks is a shorter one than Brad’s usual, but he doesn’t comment on it. By the time the house comes back into view Ray has his third set of healing blisters, and Brad’s flushed to the hairline, shirt stuck to his back with sweat. There’s no discussion about showering together. Ray just follows him in and gets under the spray, pressed up against warm muscle as Brad hands him the soap.

It’s something of an afterthought, the way Ray grabs him with a soapy hand and gets him off, vaguely lamenting the absence of real lube.

“No time,” Brad mutters, turning Ray around, shoving him into the tiles and returning the favour, warm skin on warm skin, so easy as to be a footnote in a daily routine.

Brad gets out first without turning off the water. As he leaves he yanks on a bathrobe, so Ray, suddenly cold, stays under a little longer. It was a green bathrobe, not a white one. No pink anywhere. It takes him a few minutes to feel warm again, so he just waits it out.

He follows the smell of coffee once he’s put his clothes back on, only slightly sweaty, and finds Brad in the kitchen leaning up against the counter by the fridge as the coffee brews. He’s leafing through a stack of papers, licking his finger to turn the pages down. Weirdo. Ray grabs the first cup of coffee and dumps a load of cream and sugar in it, stirring it with a finger. He’s enjoying the view of Brad in his issued gear, minus outers. Freshly showered and ready to work. Ray kind of wants to spill coffee on him, just to see what he’d do, but the thought sours immediately. Ray is still tired, somehow, a few days of sleep not making much of an impact on the jittery malaise he’s been sitting with since LA. Brad might start a fight about the coffee stain, but he might also just roll his eyes and change his shirt. Not worth it. Besides, the thought of wasting coffee is too depressing, so Ray drinks it instead, crooning gently at the mug.

Brad helps himself to the second cup, rolling his eyes at Ray as he dumps a stack of forms on the counter. Ray scans them by habit.

He puts his mug down. Even the wrong side up, Ray can read a DD-4. “What the fuck is that?” he asks anyway, hoping he’s somehow misread the heading.

Brad looks at him over his mug. “It’s a DD-4.”

“Okay, fucknuts. What’s it doing here?”

Brad crosses his arms, and the easy lassitude of the morning disappears. Every line in Brad’s body, long and hard-planed and already mostly in uniform, screams that Ray is about to get something he doesn’t want. The way Brad is looking at him makes him want to shake him until his teeth fall out, just to wipe it off his face. “It’s for you,” Brad says. “You can reenlist. I checked.”

The calm which descends onto him feels wrong, somehow; it feels like building static, or the crackle of connection before the fucking collar fired, that split-second moment of suspended animation. Ray thinks maybe the feeling is the ground slowly sliding out from under him.

“I hope you have a good fucking reason for this, because if it’s a joke I’m not laughing.”

Brad puts his mug down on the counter, at odds with the rigid tension of his mouth. “Come on, Ray. You’re immortal. You’re _immortal_ and you’re wasting your time on what? Petty vigilante justice?” Brad picks up the forms and holds them out, deadly serious. “Don’t you want to do something better with eternity?”

Ray swallows what feels like a ball of nails. “Hell,” he rasps, backed into the kitchen island with nowhere to go, “if the guy who signed me up for this in the first place had given me that speech I may have thought twice about it.”

 _Eternity._ What if it is? What if Ray’s got an infinite amount of time piled in under his skin, shoved there by pain and drugs and more than a year of proving to himself again and again that dying wasn’t going to solve his problems until they all disappeared in a haze of blood. What the hell does it matter what Ray chooses to do with it, if it’s his to spend.

“Ray?”

“You want me to reenlist.” It’s been — hell. Maybe this is what hell is, an endless carousel of mistakes. He itches for a knife to hold, but with a force of will Ray clamps his hands around his own arms instead, digging in until he feels the bruises forming under his nails, spreading into the meat of his muscle as he grips harder.

All he can hear, suddenly, is the crack of gunfire — the static tap of a Makarov — overwhelming even the blood beginning to pound in his ears. He looks at Brad and can’t force another word out. All he’s got is a head full of sound, and a little bit of fury, creeping in around the edges.

“Why the hell not?” Brad says, taking a step closer. “You’re human enough to pass the medical, you can declare you’re a meta on the forms and get evaluated, and we both know you’d requalify in—”

Ray starts to laugh, sound cracking out of him from the shock-heavy rage in his chest, crawling out through his mouth. This time, there’s no question what it is: the opposite of silent acceptance, noise to wash out the crippling seriousness in Brad’s voice.

Brad opens his mouth again, and Ray wants nothing more, suddenly, than to shove a fist in it. Not even a punch, a fist, a hand to drag out what he’s thinking and pull it into the light, but Ray can’t do that to him, not to Brad, not even for this. It’s just that he can’t possibly do the same to himself, pull out and lay bare the eighteen months after he had last signed something. He’s tried, he thinks. Probably. It’s hard to tell, but he thinks he’s tried. All that comes from thinking of it is a wave of horror, the kind that sets him off again, laughing like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do.

“We got the warning order.” Brad has stopped just past arm’s reach, but he sounds as though he’s speaking from a great distance, mouth moving faster than the words come. “We’ve got less than a month. It would be a waste for you to stay here.”

Ray sucks in a deep breath, then another, finally keeping his teeth still enough to speak, even though he doesn’t want to, not even a little bit. “A waste, huh?” He sounds like an echo, even to himself.

Brad presses the papers into his hands, and then all Ray can hear is them crumpling in his fist.

He’s back in an office building he’s driven by only once since he got back, putting pen to paper to end his life as a human. He’s back in the barracks after Iraq thinking he’ll slide right back into civvies and find something normal to do with himself, only to stare at a wall of cereal boxes, incomprehending. He’s back in Afghanistan, thrilled to have been shot in the head.

Ray’s got a million things to say, but not a one will come out of his mouth. Instead, he scoops his keys out of his pocket as Brad is detailing a requalification schedule that would have Ray reinstalled as a senior recon RTO by the end of the year. The part of Ray that isn’t screaming wants to say goodbye, in some strange way, but all he manages is five steps towards the kitchen door, zoomed out like a rifle sight, before Brad intercepts him.

“Where the fuck are you going?”

The endless loop of denials Ray can’t put words to disappears entirely, lost in the overflow of rage. “ _Now_ you want to know?” Ray thumps back into his body like a bad landing, bones jarring at the impact. Brad makes a move to touch him, and Ray bats him away, sending him staggering two steps sideways. “Now you want to know where I’m going? You wanna play Staff Sergeant and Corporal and you want me to pretend I get off on saluting you and following your orders?” Now that he’s speaking he can’t seem to stop. It’s nothing new, words exiting him fully formed in a rush, but this time he knows, and can’t wait for it to stop, just so he can leave. Leave and go — somewhere. Anywhere with nothing he’ll have to sign to stay.

Brad gets back in his way, standing up straighter than ever and placing himself right in Ray’s exit path. He looks shocked. Ray can’t say he doesn’t know the feeling. “That’s not what I—”

“Did you give a shit where I was when I was killing people in a fucking collar, Brad? Was _that_ a waste?” If Ray had hit him again, he doesn’t think Brad could look any more disturbed, but he doesn’t care, desperate for Brad to move so he won’t have to move him. “I’m not going back there. Not for the Marines. Not even for you.”

Brad, despite his reputation for calm, is rarely speechless, but he seems almost as though he’s the one missing a tongue right now.

Ray’s filled with something like bile, if bile tasted like soured coffee and anger. It would be even better to feel it, probably, but he’s just breathing hard, rigid with the need to get out of here, and for Brad to move before Ray goes right through him like a bullet. “It’s none of your fucking business what people do once they leave, is it?”

Brad doesn’t stop him when he shoves him out of the way, but even miles down the road, heading East, or North, or wherever, the worst part is that Ray still can’t tell if he wanted him to.

-

After Ray leaves, Brad heads to work. Ray will be back, and when he cools off a little he might come ho— Even as he thinks it, Brad shakes it out of his head. He smooths the forms and leaves them on the kitchen table, crumpled enlistment documents over the metahuman medical declaration. It’s eight pages long, but Ray’s been enlisted before, and if he’s human enough —

Brad stops himself a second time, hand spread over the pages. Human enough? Human enough to look like Brad had shot him again when he saw the forms. Human enough to blurt out something Brad’s still not sure he was supposed to hear. A collar. Christ.

Brad takes the bike because it’s the only way he’ll be on time. The whole way to base he has to fight to concentrate, continuously distracted by the look on Ray’s face when he left: rage, fine, Brad understands rage, even if right now he thinks it’s unjustified, but what stings most is the fear, the naked, deer-in-the-headlights terror that Ray left with still lingering.

It’s a good thing Brad has to supervise the requalification jump, because it gives him something else to think about besides what he’ll find at the house when he gets back there. He’s managed to squeeze in a few guys, and it’ll be a camp-out. The jump height means they’ll have to go somewhere with little air traffic, so Nevada it is. Brad packs a gear bag for the next day and leaves it in his storage, starting to get his work in order. He might as well jump with them, and he’s got an update due anyway. He’s got everyone squared for transport — him, a Sergeant from another unit, Kocher, Miller, Martinez and PFC Wells, their new guy, who’s almost all the way qualified and nowhere near as good a shot as Trombley, more’s the pity — when Brad heads home for the day.

When he parks the bike up in the garage and goes in through the side door Ray is still gone, nothing in the house disturbed in Brad’s absence. He even checks the bedroom, just to be sure, but the bed is made and uncreased, and Brad knows if Ray had touched it his natural entropy would have undoubtedly left a trace of his passing. Everything has that expectant feel of a fresh grave, and Brad wants to fucking kick himself. It’s early enough for a swim, so he grabs some trunks and goes, taking the car instead.

He hits the beach at sundown and swims for an hour or so, diving into the twilight on held breath and surfacing only when his lungs start to burn. When he gets home it’s been dark for hours and Ray is still nowhere to be seen.

The bloodstains on the couch never really came out, so most of the worst of them have been hidden under a blanket that Brad found somewhere, and the rug has long since been consigned to the dump, leaving nothing but the knife-marked hardwood underfoot. Brad steels himself and settles down, suddenly furious with how much the couch smells like Ray: cigarette smoke and Brad’s deodorant, the faint edge of copper and ozone. Brad turns on the TV with gritted teeth, watching the news until it becomes too frustrating.

He switches it off, determined to get a good night’s rest before Nevada tomorrow, but in the end he jolts awake at 3:30am with an arm over his eyes, neck twisted at an odd angle from the too-short couch, body feeling like he’s been fighting off shades in his sleep.

Work, usually all-consuming in the face of an upcoming deployment, entirely fails to consume him, so Brad makes up for it by zeroing in on Martinez and grilling him on their assumed combat theatre frequencies, much to Martinez’s evident confusion. Still, he’s qualified in spades for this, so before the ride to the jump site, Brad finds him in the motor pool.

“Well,” Martinez says, lapful of deconstructed radio gear shifting as he tries to decide whether to stand, before Brad indicates he shouldn’t bother, “we’re working portable this time, right? No humvees?” He chances a smile.

“You never know,” Brad says, with all seriousness, “what fuckery is in store for you.”

“Sir.” Martinez swallows. “I’ve been working on getting us some working backups for the UHF, if we’re gonna be changing terrain—”

“Hey.” Lilley wanders over, appearing from what is probably not nowhere, but certainly nowhere Martinez could see, judging by the naked relief in his eyes. “New LT’s looking for you, brah,” Lilley pronounces, laid-back as ever. He gives Brad a meaningful look. “Says he needs to come on the jump.”

Brad, cursing officers, heads off to find Parejo. He’ll have to squeeze him in or drop one of the guys, and he doesn’t want to start making sacrifices before they even hit the ground. He finds Parejo, makes the calls, and by midnight they’re in Nevada, ready for a series of night jumps. At least the last-minute change succeeds in driving Ray mostly out of Brad’s mind, until the morning they’re due to ship back to California. He’s got his papers filled in for everyone under his purview and he’s just putting the copies back to be filed with the jump supervisor when Kocher and Lilley decide it’s time to accost him.

“Brah,” Lilley says, with his usual tact, “who was she?”

Kocher is standing behind him, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, but he isn’t moving. Brad is hellishly unwilling to have this conversation. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The room is the standard for military offices everywhere: a beige colour on the walls, ugly carpet, nowhere to go before their transport touches down. Kocher and Lilley have chosen their moment well.

“Come on, man. You think no one’s noticed you going all-out on the new kids like you used to on Person, last time you got dumped? Difference is, none of ‘em will give you shit back.” Lilley frowns, his easy, open face creasing into more determined lines. “Shitty timing.”

At the mention of Ray, Brad seizes up. There’s nothing to be done about it; two guys as well trained as Kocher and Lilley will have noticed. “There’s no _she,_ ” Brad says, making sure it’s as flat as he can make it. “There’s nothing going on.”

Kocher glances at Lilley, shrewd and unsurprised. Brad surmises that he’s probably warned him Brad wouldn’t appreciate a heart-to-heart about whatever personal shit Lilley thinks he’s hiding. Lilley’s been around a long time, his demeanour belying a solid brain, good instincts with the younger guys and an unexpected set of skills, but nothing about that would prevent Brad from pulling rank on him and ending the conversation right here. Kocher, on the other hand, would kick his ass, so Brad just glares, and waits for them to go away. At least if Rudy were still around he’d make some nonsensical but well-meaning comment about dharma and try for a hug so Brad could bat him away and be done with it.

“Let us buy you a beer when we land, then,” Kocher says, and Brad knows it’s non-negotiable.

“Fine, if it’ll get you off my ass.”

Kocher fucking smirks. “Gracious in defeat as always.”

“Can I finish this in peace now, or is there something else you ladies wanted? Hard candies? Help with your walkers?”

At the confirmation in the negative, Kocher and Lilley head off to pack up. Brad makes a note to himself to square the fuck up before touching back down in California, the satisfaction of the jump already bleeding out of him. At least Wells did okay, which is promising for the ones who’d have to babysit him, as it’s too late to rotate him out now.

The short hop means Brad sleeps for most of it, heading straight for his office after they land to sign off the pile of papers that’s undoubtedly landed in his inbox in his absence. He’s still in there when Kocher and Lilley show up, evidently serious about the ominous promise of after-work drinks. Brad doesn’t bother to protest as they drag him to one of the little bars dotted around the vicinity of the base, and by 10pm they’ve changed to civvies and treated him to shitty beer and expectant stares.

“Spill it.” Kocher on the offense this time. “Did your cat die or something? Because you’re acting like it crawled up your ass and suffocated.”

Brad sips his beer and thinks about it, looking around the mostly-quiet crowd of marines and the odd POG congregating around the rickety tables. Soon he’ll be out of here, doing real work. He can hardly wait, suddenly, the prospect of a real mission to run, of real targets, of real, tangible impact settling into him. Soon he’ll be out of here and it’ll all fall into perspective. Parejo isn’t bad, and this time, Brad’s reasonably assured they won’t be rolling around in fucking humvees.

The thought of that, fleeting and accidental, brings it all back. The singing, the lack of sleep, the endless dirt, then, as if on fast-forward, the real recon work of Afghanistan: a head exploding in a cloud of blood. A familiar face.

“Brad…?”

He shakes himself, downing his beer. “As colourful as you seem to think my sex life is, nothing’s happened.”

“Bullshit,” says Kocher, Lilley nodding along like a chorus, but neither of them press further. Brad finishes the dregs of his beer and escapes, covering their next round on his way out.

He pulls into his driveway after eleven, and Ray’s yellow monstrosity is still MIA. Brad thinks about going in to check for signs of life, but doesn’t really want to discover everything exactly as he left it three days before, so he turns the engine over without a second thought, and heads to the other side of town before he can talk himself out of it.

The bar, as far as Brad can tell, has never had a name besides ‘the bar,’ or maybe just ‘that shitty dive where you can hire some asshole to rough up your ex,’ but even so he’s unhappy to find himself relieved to see it still exists absent Ray at his side. The BEER sign’s single R is illuminated, but Ray’s ride is nowhere in the lot. Brad heads inside anyway. He’s here now. It would be more of a defeat to leave.

It seems he’s walked in on one of the quieter Thursdays, though it could easily be because the usual regulars are out working, which would be a negative for the city as a whole, even if Brad is glad for the space. He scans the room but comes up empty, absent a familiar wiry frame and grin full of crowded teeth. He swallows back his reflex disgust at the place’s wet-carpet-and-old-beer smell and heads towards the bar, where he spots the bartender smoking through a thicket of hanging glasses. She, at least, is exactly where Brad expects her to be, though she seems uninterested in anything but watching Brad’s approach through the haze of cigarette smoke.

Brad slides onto a stool without thinking too hard about why the hell it’s wet and waits to order a drink. When the bartender just keeps staring at him and smoking, he orders a shot of vodka, which is delivered to him with a wordless thump. Brad doesn’t want to ask, but he doesn’t see any other way of starting this. “You seen Ray recently?”

It tastes as bad coming up as he thought it would, so he downs the vodka, grateful for its decisive foulness.

She pours him another one. “Nope. Doesn’t sound to me like he wants to see you, either.”

The blunt admission hits unexpectedly hard. It’s not just that Ray is avoiding coming ho— avoiding the house; that Brad can understand, on some level. It’s that Ray is disappearing again, sliding away from all the places Brad might find him, only this time, he’s not leaving any messages. Brad waves off the second shot, wanting to drive without impairment. “Is he—?”

“He’s not dead, if that’s what you’re asking.” The bartender gives him what might be a smirk, if she had facial expressions worth naming beyond disdain.

Brad is done here. He slides a five over the bar for the drink, only to have it slide right back.

“Cops drink free.”

“I’m not a fucking cop,” Brad blurts out, startled.

“I know,” she says, clearly irritated. “Just let me spot you a drink and try not to be such an asshole about it.”

Brad pockets the five without thinking twice about it, standing to go. “Do you at least know if he’ll be back?”

She shrugs, lighting up again. “Don’t ask me. All I know is I saw him making a list.”

Brad doesn’t bother asking what kind. If it’s anything like what Brad thinks it might be, then at least, for what it’s worth, it might be something more valuable than just beating people up in alleys. Even if it still lingers in his mouth, the vodka is gone in a flash of sobering anger: anger at Ray for just leaving, anger at himself for letting him, anger at not being able to go back in time and fix this before it started. Anger, in no small part, for the loss of something integral Ray has suffered which has driven him to this point, and which Brad isn’t sure he’ll ever quite get back.

Brad drives himself back to the house sober, and when he gets there all he sees is everything exactly as he left it. He’d better clean up before he deploys. He’d better call his family so they can all take him out for dinner. He’d better take a shower.

He sits down on the couch, intending just to think for a second, put himself in order, but finds himself drifting off.

He jerks awake still in his clothes, sweaty and disoriented by the dawn. He drags the blanket off the back of it, strips off the cushion covers, keeps the pillows with the worst staining to throw away later, and drags the rest out to the kerb before he goes inside to shower off the night and go back to base.

Three weeks later he’s on the transport out, and PFC Wells loses his lunch during the combat descent over their FOB to a chorus of good-natured jeers. Brad leans back as they level out to land, his stomach familiar enough with the sensation of a plane in freefall that he can smile through it. It’s nothing like a homecoming: he’s here to work.

-

**December, 2006**

In retrospect, Ray maybe could have fought harder.

That’s what people do, right? Normal people? Whoever they might be, doing their shitty normal people things: they fight for the things they want, deserved or not. It’s part of the whole shiny mellow package of the American Dream. It’s got to be in the rules somewhere. Come to the land of the free, buy a shotgun, defend your god-given right to have your dick sucked. Enlist, get fucked repeatedly by the military; get out, enlist in a secret superweapon project, get fucked again.

Get out again. Get fucked, the fun way this time, just for a change of pace.

Maybe the lesson should be not to aim for normal. Maybe, given a stretched enough axis of time, everyone gets shrunk to a base level of fucked up the ass.

Maybe Ray shouldn’t have ripped the radio out of his trusty pontiac fifteen miles out of Oceanside. _You should have fought harder_ was the first coherent, lucid thought to slip past the numb haze that’s gotten him out of Brad’s house. Whole lotta things he should have done, even more he shouldn’t have, and somehow, somehow, no matter how wide the blast radius, everything circles back to that fucking collar.

“Dude, I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything.” The man sprawled at Ray’s feet moans, a little, batting uselessly at the knife pinning him by the shoulder to the wall. “Please — Please let me go.”

Ray blinks. Did he say all that out loud? His face itches under the ski mask, so he scratches his nose and considers his options.

“Yeah, homes, I’ll let you go,” he says. He drops into a crouch in front of the man. The blood obscures his name tag. The congealing mess looks way too obvious on his lab coat, in Ray’s opinion; he should invest in a better colour scheme. “What, you think I’m gonna eat your face and wear your skin as a shirt? ‘Cause that hurts. That’s hurtful.”

The guy swallows, deafening in the empty and echoing lab, and the noise sets Ray’s teeth on edge. He shakes his head and stands up, tosses his spare knife from one hand to the other. Its blade catches the red and green glare of emergency lights, the lab gone into security lockdown, and truth be told Ray hasn’t felt this calm and in control of his body and surroundings since long before he’d signed away his future. Maybe it’s the bulletproof vest, or the semi-auto he’s got strapped to one thigh, parts of a uniform familiar enough for comfort and no orders but what he decides for himself.

“But first things first,” he says, grinning down at the man in the lab coat, knowing only his eyes are visible and that it can’t be a pretty sight. “Two years ago you worked on a project. You know the one.” The man shakes his head, rapid and jerky, and Ray gets down on one knee to still him by the chin. When he stops moving, Ray pats him on the cheek in approval. “No, no, buddy, it’s okay. I know you did.”

Ray places the knife tip-first against his new best friend’s orbital bone. “I just need one location,” he says, “and don’t bother bullshitting. You people turned me into one swiss army knife of fucked up mutations, so for real: if you lie to me? I’ll totally know.”

“W-what do you want?”

Ray smiles again. He knew this relationship was going places. “Where’s Macon?”

Fifteen minutes and some expansive bloodletting later, he leaves his friend still pinned to the wall. “And I’m sure someone’s gonna find you eventually, so don’t move,” he adds on his way out, “or you’ll have, like, four minutes to live. Brachial artery. Look it up.”

That’s how it goes, more or less, for more or less several months. Ray camps out in shitty motel rooms, taking everywhere with him a true Son of Sam, Unabomber, Zodiac Killer style homage to crazy paranoiacs everywhere: polaroids, security footage stills, newspaper clippings, the occasional fax or print. He rearranges it all in every motel room, connects the dots with green thread, takes five minutes to laugh at how much of a terrible cliché his life has turned into. He usually stops laughing when the scintillating commentary running through his head starts sounding like Brad.

After his scientist friend gives up and puts out, Ray gets back to the motel — five hours from the facility, in Fuckbutt, WA — unholsters his guns, strips out of the black military surplus fatigues and showers for fifty minutes. The water is scalding. Ray resolutely doesn’t melt.

It isn’t that Brad was right, on any count. It’s not that. A collar is a collar is a collar: the Corps, the project. Ray is all done with getting led around on a leash like something rabid that’s never going to be allowed in the house. The six months he’s spent on Brad’s couch burrow under his skin, a contagion of security and need he can’t reconcile.

He jerks off before the water runs cold. He doesn’t think about anything. It’s kind of an accomplishment; he’s very proud.

There’s no one to tell him off for dripping over the stale-smelling carpet or parading around bare ass naked, so Ray does both. He sits cross-legged on the bed, throws darts at his crazy person paranoia collage, then gets up to cross out two more headshots. Murtaugh’s was the first, but Ray doesn’t count that one. It’s already buried under new targets, new evidence.

Every day Ray isn’t collared, sold to the highest bidder and tortured into submission is, as far as he’s concerned, the opposite of a waste. An endless horizon filled with first days of the rest of his life, but maybe whoever examined their navel long enough to invent that adage about great power and responsibility had something of a point, buried under the self-aggrandising masturbation. Ray has a shitty power, way too gross in practice to bother wearing a sparkly cape and red short shorts, so he figures his only responsibility is to himself. And maybe, if he downs a couple shots of straight vodka and squints really hard, to some other washed out fuckers too dumb to know, or too directionless to care, that superpowers don’t come cheap.

Freedom’s gotta start somewhere, and Ray’s first taste of it was cool, great, greatness, but if Brad thinks there’s something more meaningful he could be doing with his eternity — well. Ray has some ideas, and at the top of the list is one particularly fraught, fuck-ugly loose end.

The dumb kid he’d been, twenty-four months ago, would have wanted to tie it up. Ray owes him that much.

Under the blurry black and white photo of Macon, he sticks a yellow post-it with a frowny face and an address.

He considers picking up the phone to leave some well-fucking-deserved Dolly Parton on Brad’s voicemail. Then, he considers calling Camp Pendleton and impersonating a family member to an FRO to try and find out if 1st Recon has shipped out.

Both are stupid, pathetic, bawling-Celine-Dion-in-the-bathtub ideas, so Ray vetoes them by putting out a cigarette on the photo of Macon, and another one on the inside of his own palm. He inhales the stench of burnt skin and watches the tissue regenerate, until all that’s left is the acrid smell and a patch of ash he rubs off with his thumb.

His reflection stares at him from the blank television screen, distorted through the fisheye lens. “Stay frosty, you handsome fuck,” Ray tells it, and gets to work.

The address on the yellow post-it takes him to another facility in another state, a nowhere infrastructure sustained wholly by corporate efficiency and human misery. They all look the same. Ray wonders if, when he finally gets to the one up north, he will recognise it. Doors upon doors, tight corridors, flickering lights and a vague smell of antiseptic and filtered air. He remembers all about it. He rappels down a wall and climbs through a window into an office, dark and still at two in the morning.

It’s lucky for Ray that torturing scumbags don’t keep regular office hours. Less lucky for some.

He tosses the office more for the hell of it than any other need for intel; he came prepared, just like Uncle Sam taught him. The semi-auto knocks against his thigh as he rips sliding shelves from their hinges, personnel files sent flying like shrapnel. He tries not to see the photos clipped to the files, all front-facing dead eyes and bruises, and doesn’t wonder if his is still somewhere with the rest of the lot.

Ray douses the office with gasoline, lights a match; crack, whoosh. He strolls down the corridor whistling tunelessly between his teeth.

Twenty-four months is a damn long time, but the sub-basement level where all the fun is to be had is the kind of place Ray still regularly dreams about. Not good dreams, either.

Somewhere, water is dripping from a pipe. Somewhere, there’s a scream.

“‘Cause you’re fine, and you’re mine, and you look so divine…” Ray holds his sidearm at full forward, finger on the trigger guard, as he kicks open an appropriately ominous-looking double door. “Come and get your love, come and get your lo-ove—”

Two guards, both alerted by Ray’s dulcet tones. Both go down, one with an elbow to the throat, the other with a bullet to the knee. It leaves Ray with a balding man in a lab coat, alone in the low-ceilinged space of the experimentation room. It’s the size of a small hangar, far walls blurring in the dark where the light doesn’t reach. One gurney, a youngish woman in hospital scrubs tied to it, gagged, hair shaved down to the skull. The man takes a step away from her, eyes wide and shining in the yellow light of bare bulbs hanging overhead.

“You’re not Macon,” Ray says, disappointed. The man in the lab coat stares at him, a power drill in one hand, the artist’s rendition of a mad scientist at work. It would be funny, except the woman starts struggling against the leather straps holding her in place.

It’s still a little funny.

Ray sighs, world-weary and put-upon, and unhurriedly strolls towards the gurney and his new new best friend. “This is like the worst Christmas ever, except instead of a missing Santa I got a missing psycho piece of shit who put needles in places I never knew you could stick needles in. And, homes, this whole salt of the earth boy next door demeanour—” Ray gestures at himself, at his ski mask and surplus fatigues, the guns strapped to his thighs and the rifle slung over his back “—belies a trained motherfucking killing machine, so I’m gonna ask nicely, and that’s the last time I’m gonna ask you a damn thing. Where. The fuck. Is Macon? Did he die or something? It’s only been two fucking years. Where is he?”

Up close, the man looks about fifty. Sallow skin, but he’d be sort of handsome, in a rugged way, if he got some sunshine. He shrugs, one hand drifting to the pocket of his pants. Ray is sure that’s where he keeps some kind of deadly remote.

“Do you think I’m scared of you? Scared enough to tell you anything?” the man asks, with a pitying little smile, as though he knows exactly what Ray is and it doesn’t impress him much.

Ray shoots him. The body hits the floor with a thump that makes one of the guards moan in what sounds a lot like fear.

“He probably wasn’t gonna talk anyway,” Ray tells the woman on the gurney. After a second’s worth of deliberation, he cuts the restraints holding her down, and she scrambles off and away, a good eight feet of space between them, giving Ray a cornered wild animal look. She tears the gag off her face, and her eyes are so wide Ray wants to ask if she’s not afraid they’ll fall out.

“Is this some fucked up test?” she says, hoarse, like she’s grown unused to speaking. She sounds about twelve. Jesus christ.

“Nope.”

“Are you — are you a good guy?”

Ray barks out a laugh, yanking it out from someplace deep and ragged below his lungs. “Fucking unlikely, ma’am. What I am, though, is getting the fuck out of here before the surveillance comes back online, so I guess — come with me if you want to live?”

She wants to live. Buzzing with discomfort for the duration of the drive from the facility, Ray finally drops her off at a bus station and hands her fifty bucks. She takes the money, and as she does, Ray sees an Air Force tattoo on the inside of her forearm. She pulls her sleeve down over it, quick and compulsive as if ashamed. She gets on the bus and doesn’t look back, drowning in Ray’s sweatshirt, the hood pulled low over her shaved head.

Ray hopes never to see her again.

Back at his motel, he crosses off another target location. Macon and the Arctic facility aren’t at the top of the pyramid; that spot is reserved for whoever the fuck is in charge of this whole shitshow, the project, the private capital that fuels acquisition of dormant metahuman gene carriers for fun and, Ray is willing to bet, huge fucking profit.

“No new leads,” he tells the photo of Macon, clenching and unclenching his fists. “It’s okay, I guess. This shit takes time. We’ll get there, buddy.” Ray laughs, bites his lower lip to keep it in, but it spills over in a breathless cackle. He throws himself on the queen-sized bed, the covers smelling like a week-old hamster carcass. The guns dig into his skin, and it might not be as grounding as teeth closing over the back of his neck, a firm hand closing over his biceps, but it’s good enough for now.

Pulled forward by determined momentum, a drive to be right and for Brad to have been wrong, Ray propels himself upwards again, and off the bed.

He’s got work to do, people to kill, human experiment project facilities to set on fucking fire. No rest for the wicked.

-

**April, 2007**

FOB Murala is a flat, hot basin, easily defensible and so far, pretty dull. Brad’s racked up in a little pre-fab, three bunks but only one occupied; the perks of rank and privilege. They’re in Afghanistan for almost six months before he gets what he considers a real recon mission, and in the end, they get thrown it by the motherfucking British.

Most of their brief so far has been to roll around marking targets, which isn’t a bad go, and beats platoon warfare in inadequate vehicles, but it’s a fairly routine deployment, if such a thing exists. That is, until they get a shortwave from command while they’re exploring a town leftover from the Soviets in the eighties, if the architecture is anything to go by. Martinez looks delighted by the evidence of Soviet occupation, but Brad thinks the kid’s just a weirdo. He has caught himself thinking what the reporter would have made of him, before remembering that he only showed a fraction of what they do and even then, a fraction of that. He did manage to cover a sector, though. Brad’s always appreciated that about him.

Anyway, the town is utterly deserted, and Martinez sets down the radio pack with a startled look, clicking through until he’s got a tone. It’s command, on their backup. Parejo crackles through the receiver: _Report to extraction point delta by 0200 hours, how copy?_ Brad has Martinez radio back and goes to signal Hasser and Lilley, just about managing to suppress a grin. “Pick it up, gentlemen. We’re extracting early.”

“Any word on why?” Lilley whispers.

“Not yet.” Brad pulls them back into their setup point and plans a faster route to delta. 0200 is full dark and they have a fair few miles to cover. Once everyone’s set, they head off. The terrain’s not bad, but it’s a small team and they’re running dark, so any change of direction is going to be a gamble.

Brad is as surprised as anyone when the helo waiting for them is a British Chinook, twin rotors idly stroking the air as it settles. As soon as they’re in it’s off the ground again. It’s no place to be a sitting duck.

The cadre of four filling out the other benches are in Royal Marines uniforms, which is something of a surprise as well, but not one Brad is going to comment on. He spares a look at Martinez, who thankfully also keeps his trap shut about it. There’s not very many of them, and Brad can consider them honorary non-POGs by reputation. That, and they have a Lieutenant with them. Brad waits for the brief, Walt pressed in on his left and Lilley on the right, Martinez filling out the numbers with a seat by the open bay door.

The Lieutenant, name not visible on his uniform, glances over them and waits until they’re at a cruising altitude to start yelling over the rotors. “Kind of you to join us!” The wind pulls the words almost right out of his mouth, and absent a name Brad can only identify him by features — a hooked nose and very dark eyes, thin lips — and, of course, clipped accent. “We’ve got what you might call a hostage situation.”

Brad waits for him to carry on; he outranks Walt by only a chevron, these days, but this guy, if they’re on the same brief, outranks them both. Walt glances sidelong at Brad, and raises an eyebrow.

The Lieutenant smiles tightly. “Some of our NGO brethren have gotten themselves picked up by Russian auxiliaries,” he continues. “Of course, civilians shouldn’t really be anywhere near their corridor, but since they are, they’re our business. We want this over as quickly as possible, and you’re cleared and in the area. Sorry to take you off your course.”

Brad calculates, quickly and without really thinking about it: if the Russians are kidnapping NGO workers, they’re entering into active conflict. The question is obvious: “I didn’t think there were any NGOs cleared to operate near here.”

The Lieutenant grins. “Let’s assume there are, shall we?”

Brad grins right back, Walt laughing silently next to him. This has all the makings of a true clusterfuck. Martinez is staring straight ahead, lips pulled back like a circus clown. Brad knows he’s got the stones for it now, but suddenly, and with an unexpected jolt, he’s reminded of Ray; the look on his face when he came back from Afghanistan the second time, not the expression of laconic readiness Brad had gotten used to for their worst moments. That seems to be gone forever. He shakes it off, listening as the LT details the op.

Recon goes first, sets up a surveillance site, and reports back on the situation. Kocher confirms with a nod. Brad marks it in his head — unknown number of hostiles, likely a small detachment, ten to twelve. Three missing British agents, if Brad reads correctly through the lines. The RMs to follow and clear. For the moment, everything is crystal in its clarity. The mission is opaque to the point of absurdity, but Brad can never claim this isn’t a job he thrives on. The demands of it even push Ray out of his mind, despite the familiarity, the creeping sense of déjà vu. Every day is a different fuckup.

Brad lives for this: the short turnaround, the thrill of a problem to solve on the fly. Martinez bends to the task of matching frequencies with their temporary squadmates, his opposite number calling codes so Martinez can hear.

“What have you got on the hostiles?” Brad asks, when he’s sure everyone is squared up.

“Spetsnaz,” spits the British RTO, also going badgeless.

Brad nods, but all his blood seems to slow down, pulling through his veins with glacial reluctance. It can’t be the same PMCs. That would be too absurd.

“Not officially,” the LT overrules, still shouting over the chug of the engines, “but we’ve had our eye on them for a while. I think some of your gear may have moved them out of the foothills, so they’re working lower down, nearer civilian cover.”

Brad doesn’t bother to protest the slight, instead swallowing the sight of a man getting shot through the kneecaps and standing right back up. “Any word on metahuman elements with them?”

Headshakes in the negative, and through the noise, Brad remembers Ray’s parting shot, the tight, hard tenor of his voice. Brad can’t lie that it doesn’t alter his perception of how many hostages there are, knowing what he knows now. When it had been a distant figure covered in blood, that’s all it had been: a body, a bag, an invisible head. Knowing what he knows now, whatever they encounter that isn’t human likely isn’t there by choice. Brad silently counts the possibility of another body for the collateral damage. He puts his head down and checks his gear, letting the distinctive rhythm of Chinook blades draw him to combat readiness.

They drop down in farmland near dawn, and the visibility is tricky. Too bright for NVGs, but the predawn flattens the depth. Still, their job is to observe. It’s the other guys who’ve lost men on the field. Brad is happy just to be backup on this one. He leads them in a sweep towards a distant cluster of bungalows, signaling Walt and Lilley to swing wide and for Martinez to stick close to him. He raises a scope, aiming at the only house with lights on in the village. Rookie mistake, choosing an abandoned spot, but it makes his job easier.

Through the sight, he spots them: six men in unmarked black, standard carbines and what look like Makarovs. Brad recognises the gear with an uncomfortable jolt, forcing himself to breathe out and take a better look. He clocks the stances, the bored certainty, the dust of travel staining the edges of everything that’ll show it. It’s the hostages Brad has his eye on next, seeing three restrained bodies, but none with the telling laxity of a fresh corpse. From here it’s difficult to ascertain what levels of professionality the Brits may have lost track of, but Brad sees civilian clothing, no evidence of training, and one of them’s a woman. If they’re agents, they’re up shit creek, but they’re well-disguised.

Brad gives Martinez the signal, and he clicks it back to the helo, bursts for number of hostages, clicks for hostiles, and then they’re heading back. Brad gives the details to the Lieutenant, drawing Walt in to confirm.

“Right,” he says, dark face creasing. “Pilot stays with you, be ready for emergency frequencies, but as far as respective…jurisdiction? We’ll take it from here.”

Brad had expected as much, but he confirms receipt of orders, and falls back to a defensive position around the Chinook. No point extracting hostages if there’s nothing to get them home in. The truth is, it’s boring, and Brad has too much time to think. It’s the kind of boredom that comes from inurement. The kind of boredom that isn’t really a state of disinterest so much as distraction.

All Brad can think of, looking at hostages then being forced back, is what kind of shit Ray might have been a part of out here, and what he might have been made to do. Brad thinks about the camp in the Kush and knows Ray would have protested killing civilians. He can’t help but know how much worse that would have made it.

A voice calls towards them. The medic rushes by, reaching with practice for the rest of his kit, gun swinging away as he moves, and then it’s organised activity, Brad tightening their line, the Brits loading hostages into the bay, everyone calling in their boarding as the rotors begin to speed up.

It’s only once they’re in the air, the medic occupied in the centre of the bay with minor injuries, that Brad makes eye contact with the nameless Lieutenant. “Survivors?”

He shakes his head. “Can’t say more.”

Brad indicates assent, but can’t help ask one more question. “Where are they based?”

“Why, so you can bomb them again and drive them further in? We liked it better when they just lent the fedayeen a hand from time to time in exchange for heroin, you know.”

Brad shrugs, deliberately not showing eagerness.

“We had them a few klicks outside Parun, last we heard, but we’ve orders to leave them.” He nods, looking at the recovered hostages, making no eye contact with Americans as yet. “If they interfere with us, on the other hand…”

“Likewise,” Brad says, hoping his face says _PMCs. What can you do?_ and leaving it at that.

Brad and his guys get dropped off near their original AO, lining down so the helo won’t have to make landfall, and heading back to their original extraction. Brad has Martinez radio in to confirm as they go, all attention and energy occupied by staying undetected. Daylight is not ideal.

They pile into a convoy, Brad and Lilley in one, Martinez and Hasser in the other, and for a second it’s almost like being back in Iraq, except this time the victors are plated and nobody’s making speeches about losing supplies. It’s a three hour drive back to Murala, so Brad nods the hell off.

Once they’re back, he endures the postmortem with Parejo, files the papers, and goes to sleep for the rest of the day. As he’s waking up it’s nightfall, and he knows it’ll be hell on his sleep schedule, but it’s already fucked six ways from Sunday anyway. He goes for a slow run around the camp to wind down, and marvels again at how night seems to come all at once here, blazing, orange sunset collapsing into full dark without much twilight in between, at odds with the slow dawn. As he’s running, Brad waits for the comedown, the fading buzz of a successful mission, up to a point, crawling out of him now that he’s back behind the wire.

Instead, he drags in rasping breaths in the cool night air, rhythmic tap of his feet failing to divert his train of thought. It’s hard not to drag all this shit back home with him; every time he leaves he has to spend a little more time dropping baggage. A few more speeding tickets, a few more sleepless nights, and for him, that’s the price of doing good work. If he were forced to stay, maybe it would have been different. Brad’s never had a gun pointed at his head and been told to do his job. Brad’s never had a gun to his head that couldn’t have killed him permanently, instead of being used as just another endless counterpoint to the evidence of lost humanity.

He runs himself out at about midnight, getting strange looks from the guys on watch. He uses up some shower time, then drags out his laptop, staring at the closed cover.

He’s got a limited amount of contact time, and a limited amount of internet access. He’s never found reason to complain about it before, too occupied with work, but now, rather than calling his sister, or checking his mail, he’s got an unbearable urge to spend an hour trawling knitting forums until he finds the one most likely to carry a message for him. Brad gets up and goes to find an access point.

He finds three likely vectors: one for geometric knitters, one for knitters with a specific interest in cats, and one for women over sixty-five. Brad signs up to all three and leaves the same message.

If Ray can’t figure it out, then Brad has been wasting his time in more ways than one, but if Ray’s doing what he thinks he is, then Brad’s giving him an option, not an ultimatum, and he has to think that might be enough.

-

**May, 2007**

Ray breaks into an abandoned motel outside of Fairbanks to clean his guns. Okay, they’re not strictly speaking his, but at this point Ray is certain that the law of finders-keepers is on his side. The surroundings — peeling purple wallpaper, a wild array of different moulds, empty minibar, obligatory collage — leave much to be desired, but as Alaska is nowhere Ray would have ever paid to go back to, it sort of works out. Besides, he pulled over a trucker and hitched most of the way, and that guy didn’t even want a blowjob, so it was practically a free trip from start to finish before he stole a car for the last leg. The yellow pontiac crapped out somewhere south of the border and Ray had given it a viking funeral.

Thinking of blowjobs leaves the wrong kind of sour taste in his mouth, so he sets asides the little revolver he’s been taking his time reassembling and goes for the semi he found on a guard at the last place before this one. Honestly, Ray had almost taken the guy to task for his gun safety before shooting him in the kneecap. The things people leave lying around. It’s just careless, is what it is. Almost as careless as convincing people to sign up for an under the table medical mutation program, then selling them to the highest bidder.

The bad taste is back. Ray pulls out the cartridge and clears the chamber, thinking of the Air Force girl, standing at a bus stop in Ray’s clothes, looking skinnier than him and for all the world like a lost drug casualty.

It’s not that Ray didn’t already know he was just a small part of what might qualify as a bona fide niche industry; even with the Russians he’d caught sight of other collars, other hollow-looking eyes. It’s just that isolation is a powerful tool, and Ray’s had more than his fair share of it. It was hard not to live inside his own head in Afghanistan and it’s not a hell of a lot easier now, but at least now he has guns he can keep. Fuck, he hopes Air Force girl went home.

Ray moves on to the rifle, which is a huge pain to carry around, but if Ray’s learned anything over the last four months, it’s that he never knows when he might need a scope on something. It takes him most of the day, staring at the collage and its mess of green threads, to realise he’s stalling about something. Aside from that, he’s starving, possibly literally, because he can’t really remember the last time he ate. There are protein bars in his bag but they taste like sawdust, and Ray’s been a little busy.

Fairbanks isn’t exactly flush with haute cuisine, but what it does have in abundance is diners. Ray stashes his gear and goes to sate his sudden craving for pancakes. It would be way more atmospheric to trudge through piles of snow in anticipation of succor, but it’s May, and people are wearing t-shirts. Figures.

He finds a diner attached to a truckstop a little closer to town, all sticky red vinyl and dilapidated jukeboxes, warped records still trapped inside like sad, circular butterflies. A grimy sign on the counter proclaims _Free wifi!_ in comic sans. Ray must be delirious.

Good thing the place smells great, old grease and new bacon. Perfect. He slides onto a stool at the counter and gives the waitress a winning smile when she hands him a menu. Everything is way more expensive than it should be, and Ray is already down fifty bucks of the bribery stash he’s thinking of as his blood money, in a somewhat hilarious reversal. Some of it has actual blood on it. That being said, his stomach is making itself known by trying to climb out of his body towards the kitchen, so he resigns himself to overpaying. Fucking Alaska.

He orders a short stack with extra, extra bacon and yanks out the battered laptop he’s ‘acquired’ along the way. Can’t avoid the modern world forever. The free wifi is shitty, but he manages to pull up some backchannel satellite imaging sites and decides planning a route is the better part of a well-executed bloody revenge. He’s got a target, now, and if Macon thinks he can just carry on doing his work here after Ray’s taken out what he thinks is most of his supply line, well, he deserves what he gets.

The waitress deposits a plate in front of him so loaded with food he nearly kisses her. Six huge pancakes, dripping syrup, twelve slices of — “Is this bacon _Canadian?!_ ”

Her look says ‘deal with it’ but her mouth says: “You want me to go take it up with the pig?”

Ray shoves a whole piece in his mouth and chews, achieving a tenuous truce. And people say diplomacy is dead. He eats his Canadian bacon without further reluctance, getting his keyboard a little sticky as he clicks methodically through the likeliest locations for horror bunkers near the Arctic circle, looking for the shapes of squat buildings and a huge hangar, close enough to a town for supplies but far enough away to reject scrutiny. Ray’s surprised by how much life is clinging to the subarctic, butting up against a part of the world that’s still a little primordial. He shakes himself out of the dawning reflective mood by shoving as much of a whole pancake in his mouth as he can manage.

When somebody had spilled the beans that the testing facility is in Alaska, Ray had truthfully been a little disappointed. He’d been picturing some supervillain lair nestled in the ice on Svalbard, filled with an exciting selection of people to exact revenge on, but no dice. Just homegrown evil. It does make him feel a little better about the whole eye-for-an-eye thing he’s got going though. That’s as American as the rampant and unregulated availability of guns.

Something weird catches his eye, and he clicks back a slide. The vast majority of the image is the north edge of Barrow, but just beyond it, out on the tundra, is the shape he’s looking for. Good thing he packed a sweater, because unless he steals a snowmobile he’s going to have to do some hiking.

He finishes his last pancake as the waitress tops up his third free refill. Ray tips it in thanks and drinks half, already marking his final goal. Macon’s up there somewhere, and Ray is going to kill him. He rewards himself for his hard work by ordering a slice of whatever pie is going and settling in for a good ten minutes of shop talk with the elderly knitters of America. It’s far better than a soap opera for relaxing, and Ray’s got a long night ahead.

He’s halfway down the forum thread for cat patterns, having replied to several praising their whisker definition, when he stumbles into a discussion between Ethel and Millicent about the crossfire over a recently-discovered post regarding a troll on the boards. Ray, an active member, can’t help but investigate. Trust the moderators not to have availed themselves to comment moderation, because there it is: _To the sick fuck posting knitting patterns for dick socks, we’re onto you. Take your degenerate, inbred filth back to where it came from!_

Ray freezes. The message itself is white noise, suddenly, over the shape of the signature. It’s a bunch of random characters arranged to look like an angry cat, if said cat were drawn by a person half-blind who’s only ever seen a cat once, but every so often the characters are replaced, seemingly at random, with numbers.

Ray, pie forgotten, counts them out. Enough for — _back to where it came from._ On a hunch, Ray tabs back to the map server and taps the numbers in.

South of the Hindu Kush. “Well I’ll be damned.”

“Same goes for all of us, honey,” the waitress says, handing him his bill. “That’ll be $27.50.”

Ray’s frozen. Alaska in May melts away. He digs the heels of his palms into his eyes until they light up with starbursts, watching them until he’s dizzy. He can hardly breathe through the knot in his stomach or the tightness of his throat, as if a hand has reached through the screen, grabbed him by the throat and squeezed.

“Hey, are you—”

Ray slams the laptop shut, scooping it back into his bag without looking. He leaves $40 on the counter, grabs the pie in his hand like a pizza and shoves it in his mouth in three bites on his way out.

He’s got a doctor to kill, and damned either way, he’s not going to let one message from the last person in the world he wants to think about interrupt him.

Ray spends the night in the motel staring at the ceiling, and in the morning he bribes a supply pilot to take him as far as Barrow by sneaking into the pilot’s lounge at the outpost next to the airport. Two days later he’s walking on permafrost in the wrong boots, cursing whoever invented Alaska. He hopes they die in a fire. Much like several others might be about to.

He eats his last protein bar half a day before he spots the squat silhouettes of the hangar and its outbuildings on the deceptive horizon. All that training put to good use after all, navigating up here on two wings and a glare. Ray checks his gear (“For hunting,” he’d said, with a big smile. The pilot had declined to ask for a permit) and settles in to wait for what passes for nightfall, the sun throwing long, low shadows as it skims the earth.

As the light changes, Ray settles on his stomach six hundred metres out, and assembles the rifle, peering through the scope. A calm begins to descend on him, something familiar about the movements, the distance, the feeling of the metal in his hands.

There aren’t many people moving, but after a while the sun goes straight into Ray’s eyes, and everything is technicolour. He drops the rifle, covering his eyes, but that’s not enough to erase the taste of static in his mouth, or the shudder of reflex anticipation of a shock that jolts all the way down his spine.

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. The litany repeats as Ray relives his first ever death, stuck up here in the polar winter, facing the other way. Looking at the buildings from afar, Ray still can’t quite manage to remember the distance. He’d known, coming back to life for the first time already strapped to the chair, camera filming in the corner, that he wasn’t ever getting out again.

Ray picks up the rifle, and goes back to watching people through the scope.

A pattern emerges as he looks, and it’s almost a giddy relief. This place is designed to keep people in. The land does all the other work to keep people out. It will never be dark, so there’s no time like the present.

He pops the first guy from a distance, then the next, coming to investigate. He ditches the rifle and starts running when a third rounds the corner and looks towards him. When Ray shoots him between the eyes, he thinks to find an access card in his pocket, and finds the nearest door to the bunker he remembers far, far too well.

The numbered doors along the corridor look exactly the same, flickering neon light and grey industrial paint, the faint smell of antiseptic and something viciously chemical in the air, making all his hair stand on end. It’s eerily silent, but not for long if he has anything to say about it. He picks a door at random, yells a warning and shoots the lock out.

The woman in the cell looks nearly dead, but her eyes have something weird going on, lit from within, fixed on a far point as if looking through him. “Seventeen guns?” she asks, dazed and ashen under her dark skin.

“Sixteen.” Ray hands her the semi, which she takes with evident ingrained practice. “Feel like opening some doors?”

She blinks, eyes nowhere near focused. “I can see what’s behind them,” she says, dreamily, as though this isn’t news but she isn’t used to it. Ray could sympathise, but he’s on a schedule.

“That’ll save time,” he says, and makes an exit.

He runs down the hall towards door number 12, eerily silent save for the intermittent crack of gunfire in an enclosed space, and then he turns the corner.

The hall seems so much shorter when Ray isn’t being dragged through it in handcuffs. Go figure. The room at the end isn’t locked, but it must be soundproofed, because when he slams the door open, Macon has his back to it, obstructing Ray’s view of what he’s doing. Ray sees the camera first, still set up to film so that buyers can see what they’re getting. He blows it a kiss, and fucking shoots it.

Macon jerks around, revealing Baker’s replacement behind him, working on the slumped form of a man with spiny protrusions all around his chest, one of which New Baker is currently extracting.

Macon gapes at him. “What the—”

Ray gives him enough time to remember him, watching his eyes widen, before he shoots him too. It’s not a killing shot, not right away. Ray just doesn’t want to be interrupted this time.

He finishes off New Baker, then, bloody pliers clattering very loudly in the sudden silence as Macon’s groaning cuts off, Ray’s boot on his neck facilitating the process. “Hi. I wouldn’t move much if I were you. Hurts, doesn’t it?”

Macon, going slowly purple, wheezes. Ray gives him a little more air.

“Person,” he says, clutching at the dirty leather, “how did you—”

Ray is not, he discovers, in the mood to hear Macon’s voice. “See, here’s the thing about making sure someone’s a freak,” he says, putting a little more weight behind his stance, “you’re not the only one who learns.”

Macon makes a noise like he’s trying to scream, and for a moment, Ray wants to let him, just leave him here to slowly bleed out.

The last bullet rings louder, he thinks.

Maybe it’s just his imagination, but suddenly, in a small, soundproofed room with two dead bodies and an unconscious man, Ray can’t manage to be satisfied. Once they’re dead, they’re just dead. Truthfully, Ray’s a little hollow, and a little tired. It's been a long time since he was here and yet, somehow, now it feels like no time at all, as though he’s just circled back and repeated himself. Maybe if he hadn’t seen the message from —

He turns, and thinks about the long way back south. Maybe if there was anything for him to go back to it wouldn’t seem quite so endless, but he can’t stay up here, waiting for the polar winter to freeze him solid. He’d just wake up.

If he’s hoping for a quick exit, he’s disappointed again. The way out is chaos, six dazed people in various states of undress standing around the woman with the strange eyes, watching Ray come back around the corner. They fall silent when he shows up, staring at him. Maybe it’s the blood. “Um.” He shrugs, deciding to wing it. “Hands up who’s a pilot?”

Three hands. God bless America.

It’s the work of about an hour to clear the base and gain access to the hangar, and yet, strangely, all Ray can think about is knitting. Maybe it’s the spiny protrusions, but either way, as he’s picking his way towards the exit, he’s turning the coordinates over in his head, thinking about the stitch of topography, turning to the pain of a deep puncture wound. Green thread.

It isn’t like the pyramid-top of his crazy conspiracy collage won’t be there, waiting for him, after. It’s not like Ray can’t take a detour. He’s got nobody’s orders to follow but his own.

Thinking about Afghanistan, something indelible pulling him on to the next target, drawing him back across to the other side of the world like a snapped bowstring, he’s forced to admit that he knows what it is: Brad sending him coded messages only he’d be able to parse from the far side of the planet, telling him that if he wants a little more revenge, Brad knows where to find it. Maybe it’s too much to think they’re speaking the same language, but at least Ray has experienced death enough times to know that whatever he does is never going to be the end of the line for him. It’s Brad who is the finite quality, the one who is taking a risk.

Ray’s got plenty of death to spare, but Brad has only got the one. Ray’s already relived his first. He might as well relive the only one that mattered. He hadn’t known it was Brad at the time, but god, he’d fucking hoped, and lo and behold, it was.

What’s a few more for old time’s sake? Ray looks out over the tundra, spring-wet and vast, and doesn’t even flinch.

-

**June, 2007**

There ought to be few things stranger than waking up in the middle of the night to find Ray Person staring at him from across the room, but Brad can’t muster up any genuine shock.

Ray is sat cross-legged on the floor, body positioned perpendicular to Brad’s cot, his back against the door. He’s watching Brad with his chin rested on one hand, perfectly at home in the shitty, stifling quarters Brad shares with a couple senior NCOs currently on watch. The room smelled less like sweat and bad male hygiene when it was just Brad occupying it, but he’s making do.

Ray has fatigues on, a tac vest, more guns than Brad could count on one hand, and the calmly rigid look of any marine about to take a diving breath before submersion.

He looks the same, sharp edges stark and cutting in the near dark, tired eyes focused with jittery intent; but he looks nothing like the Ray Person who had stormed out of Brad’s house eight months ago, gone in the fucking eyes, and Brad nearly chokes on a feeling he’s willing to bend over far enough to identify as relief.

Next to Ray, he must look infinitely worse: combat-thin and a few weeks away from a real shower, fatigue and higher-ups’ fuckery weighing his shoulders down.

There are plenty of things he should say, at this point, and Ray is watching him with half challenge and half expectation written all over his face.

“Shouldn’t you be wearing a cape or something?”

Ray grins. “Brad, Brad, Brad. Do I look like fruity Rudy to you? Please.”

He stands, and Brad gets up at the same time, body moving without much input from his brain. As much as Ray’s presence doesn’t surprise him, he’s thrown by how easy it still is to react to him. As though nothing has changed in the time he’d been gone, and isn’t that a weird thought, made weirder still when Brad realises he’s not sure which one of them has been gone, really. His bare arms itch for the cover of a uniform as Ray frankly and unashamedly looks him over.

“Homes, you’ve let yourself go.”

“Or maybe you just forgot what real men look like.”

Brad chances another step forward, to the edges of Ray’s personal space, but doesn’t risk any sudden movements, doesn’t try to touch Ray or grab him. It takes some effort: a small part of him is itching to confirm the evidence of his eyes, somehow, make sure it really is Ray. As if there’s anyone else who could sport Ray’s particular mix of insanity and determination, and enough smarts to break into an active FOB in the ass end of nowhere, Afghanistan.

The last time Brad touched him without a written invitation, Ray went for his throat. Nothing about him has been easy from the very start; his current lucid calm might just as well be a hardwired front, as brittle as it ever was. Brad opts to err on the side of caution.

Ray is watching him, still, as if drinking in some alien sight. “That’s not what your mom told me last night.”

“Is this a social call, Ray? Because as always, your conversational skills leave me in awe.”

“Hey, you’re the one that did the whole cloak and goddamn dagger routine. Me? I’m just hoping for an apology blowjob, I’m pretty fucking sure you owe me one.” He says it with no bite, no real anger, just the customary mocking edge that, when he aims it at Brad, may very well be a sign of affection. “So you tell me, Brad. This supposed to be a social call?”

Fuck caution. Brad grabs Ray by the front of his tac vest and slams him into a wall, air escaping Ray’s lungs in a heady laugh.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Brad demands, punctuating the words with another shove. He’s clenched his fists hard enough he loses feeling in his fingers.

“Places,” says Ray, grinning, but the grin is sane and full of shit. He tests Brad’s hold, doesn’t push him off. “Why, did you miss me? Be honest, now, I won’t judge.”

“I didn’t. Can’t speak for all the farm animals in California, though. They must be wasting away.”

Ray cackles, rusty around the edges. Brad feels it reverberate through his own chest, radiating outward from their single point of contact. He’s about to do something stupid and risky, given that there’s a single door between him and Ray and the rest of the highly-trained American and British marines on base, when Ray kicks his feet out from under him.

Brad lands heavily, tailbone and shoulder blades taking most of the impact, not helped by Ray dropping down on top of him. His knees bracket Brad’s hips.

Eight months’ worth of absence, but muscle memory is enough. Combat ready, aching for the familiar weight of a pistol any time he’s not armed, and it doesn’t even occur to Brad to fight. It doesn’t occur to him to try.

He raises his eyebrows and waits.

“I heard talk there’s a reunion,” says Ray, eyes bright in the dark. “But whaddaya know, some shitbrain lost my fucking invitation. So thanks for cluing me in.”

“Wouldn’t want you to miss it. In case you wanted to say hi.”

“And I appreciate it, dude.” Ray pats him, coordinated but careless, on top of the collar bone, rough gloves scraping bare skin. Brad wants to ask him what he’s done, who he’d killed, to reign in at least some of the crazy that kept spilling out, to shave down the jagged edges of whatever fucking lunacy he’d brought to Brad’s doorstep. “I’m thinking small op, two man team. You in?”

Brad swallows. Ray tracks the movement of his adam’s apple.

It’s the million dollar question. Brad knew it would have to happen, the choice that’s never been a choice for him; he forced Ray to pick a side, watched him shut down around what could never be a choice for him, either. The misery that loves company. Brad wondered from the moment he’d left the message for Ray what he might do if Ray asked him to come, asked him for help.

The million dollar question isn’t a question. It can’t be, with only one answer that could ever roll off Brad’s tongue without dislodging his entire being from its hinges.

“I won’t go AWOL,” he says, isn’t particularly surprised when Ray’s expression softens, confirmation of what he must have known he’d hear. “Not even for you.”

“That just figures.” Ray picks himself up, offers Brad a hand. Brad takes it, and tries to ignore the part of him painfully aware that it’s the first time he’s touched Ray in for-fucking-ever. “No apology blowjobs, no company for this fucking awesome mission, pussy bitch whining about how my hardcore vigilante standards don’t conform to your gay ass couture expectations about — fucking — capes and shit. No one wears capes, Brad.”

He doesn’t step out of Brad’s personal space, doesn’t stop looking at Brad like a hungry stray eyeing fresh roadkill. It’s enough to make Brad’s blood pound a little faster, make his skin feel a little warmer. Same as before; maybe more so, now that Brad has a little more hard-earned perspective.

However long it takes before this tour wraps up, he doesn’t think it will be another eight months. Outside of a combat zone, far from the AO, he might get another chance. The hope feels alien, like a barbed fish hook caught beneath his ribs.

“I’ll get you to the fence, but you’re on your own from there.” Christ; they’re standing too close. Brad can hardly make himself move in any direction that opposes Ray’s gravitational pull. “You got bolt cutters on you?”

“Just guns. I can climb a fence, you smug bastard.”

Brad only needs to get a few things before he’s ready to direct Ray to his drop zone.

Even a certified shithole like FOB Murala is never really quiet at any time of night, with so many snoring, unwashed fuckups tossing and turning in their sleep and trained to wake up at the lightest touch of someone’s shadow falling over their grave. Ray stays silent as he and Brad make their way outside, where the air is as stale and stifling as inside the barracks, only colder. Brad keeps them away from the firewatch sightlines. It’s easier to move inside the perimeter than outside of it without getting spotted.

Not easy enough that Brad can’t feel the spike of adrenaline, and he’s strikingly conscious of the dangerous precedent he’s setting for himself, skirting the edge of insubordination or worse. Just the once. Just to get Ray over the fence and set him on his way; if anyone has earned to enact a morally fucking dubious vendetta with Brad’s complicity and tacit approval, it’s Ray. His refusal to lie down and take it was the first thing that stood out about him to Brad, in a time so removed from their current circumstance as to be ephemeral.

Brad thinks of the hostages; he thinks of a man getting shot through the knees and getting back up, the line-of-sight kill that had started it all. He moves to walk closer to Ray, matching the cadence of his breath, just like old times and nothing like it at all: it isn’t a fresh out of the water corporal at his side, now, but the thing is —

The thing is, Brad doesn’t want that guy back. The truth of it hits him like a thirty-seven mike-mike to the solar plexus.

He’d spent months looking for familiarity in every jagged bone poking out of Ray’s new skin. He got so lost in the looking, he missed the new familiarity creeping in.

“Any intel you could spare me, Iceman?”

Brad inhales cold, stagnant desert air. “Small detachment,” he says. The wire around the perimeter catches faint yellowish fluorescents from the base, the moon far too sunken beneath clouds to aid visibility. Brad leads Ray to the edge of the fence, where the barbed wire slopes enough that Ray won’t tear his own skin off going over. Brad pulls him down into a crouch. “I got eyes on six last time, but we have no confirmation either way.”

Ray rolls his eyes.

“Marines make do,” Brad reminds him, just to pull on that thread. He’s going to be appalled at himself later, but until then they can stay leaned in far too close for plausible deniability and Brad can let himself not give too much of a shit.

“Gee, good thing I’m not a marine any more.”

“Yeah, it is.” At that, Ray stares at him, as though faced with a heretofore unknown species, but curious enough to roll with it. “It’s a good thing,” Brad says. He hands Ray a pair of NVGs he’s going to write off as a combat casualty in a report tomorrow.

“Batteries?”

Brad grins. “Oh, yeah. Command couldn’t have us looking like limp-wristed pussies next to the Brits, we’ve got batteries out the ass.”

Ray whistles, impressed, one hand snaking up to rub at the side of his neck, an unconscious tic. Brad felt it as they neared the edge of the perimeter, the gradual tightening of Ray’s posture: nothing like fear, nothing in the same ballpark as new guys puking before their first mission. It’s the same kind of expectant, anticipatory tension Brad knows like a second skin.

He never saw the collar Ray had been forced into, and it’s probably better this way. He doesn’t offer to extract Ray if his op goes badly, and Ray doesn’t ask him to, but the reminder — the single touch, gloved fingers scratching at the skin above the edge of Ray’s tac vest — it’s enough. If there is any indication that Ray’s mission has gone into clusterfuck territory, if he gets captured —

It would mean desertion to go after him.

“You better fucking stay frosty,” Brad tells him. “Gonna be a gigantic pain in my asshole otherwise.”

Ray leers at the choice of words, but it only lasts a moment, and then he assumes the exaggerated pout that makes him look like a queen. “Preaching to the motherfucking choir, yo.”

“Just don’t get yourself caught. I’m not breaking you out of a zoo, you belong in one.”

“Whatever, I bet they’ve got conjugals.” Ray cackles at his own joke, a little of the manic energy Brad recognises from uppers-fuelled days in Iraq bleeding into his posture. “You gonna wait up for me, Brad? Wave me off with a tear-stained hankie and shit?”

“I’d shove it up your ass if I didn’t know you’d enjoy that.”

They grin at each other, the briefest moment of pre-battle equilibrium. Brad instinctively checks the time. In less than half an hour, the firewatch shift will change, and someone is going to wonder why he’s not in his quarters. He could still go with Ray, but even as the idea occurs to him, he dismisses it. He catches Ray’s eye in the faint fluorescent glare, counting down seconds in his head.

“Ray, I—” Brad makes an aborted gesture as all the meaningful, touchy-feely bullshit he could say gets trapped in his throat, stuck at awkward angles. He’s glad for it.

“Yeah, whatever, I know,” Ray says, knocking a closed fist into Brad’s shoulder hard enough that Brad rocks back on his heels, dirt crunching under his feet. “Jesus, homes, stop being so fucking gay.”

Brad rolls his eyes. Twenty-four minutes. “I’ll see you at home, Ray.”

He should get a medal for how casual it comes out, but Ray still stares at him, for a split second caught absolutely speechless. Then he shakes his head. Brad could sharpen knives on the edges of his grin.

“Yeah,” he says, almost fond, and Brad knows that he gets it, whatever there is to be got. “You bet your ass you will.”

He gives Brad a lazy, offhand salute, and without another word scales the fence. It’s dark enough that once he’s up and over, jumping feet-first past the coil of barbed wire, all feline reflexes, Brad can barely make out his silhouette against the backdrop of indistinct shapes in the night.

All that’s left is the creak of wire, then the scuff of boots on gravel and dirt, fading into silence.

Brad doesn’t watch him go. He stands, stretches his arms over his head to loosen the tension in his spine. He’s got time to get back.

There’s time, in more ways than one.

Brad turns on his heel and sets off in the opposite direction, towards the base. He doesn’t look back.

 

**The End**

 

 **febricant**  
imaginary epilogue where Brad sits on Ray’s face  
**csoru**  
crol  
obviously

 

**Playlist (Completely Serious and Necessary)**

In no particular order:

Escape (The Piña Colada Song)  
Cherry Bomb  
Love is a Battlefield  
Straight Up  
Jolene  
Hollaback Girl  
Dancing Queen  
Come and Get Your Love  
Son of a Preacher Man  
Blowin’ in the Wind  
Bad Reputation  
Rubber Duckie Song  
Save A Horse, Ride A Cowboy  
Unspecified Springsteen Of Your Choice

**Author's Note:**

> SPOILERY WARNINGS:
> 
> At one point one character gets sold to mercenaries by a shady enterprise masquerading as a legit one. Thanks, Deadpool Movie, for that plot bunny, so consider this a slavery warning as well. 
> 
> We’ll see you in hell!


End file.
